Unthreaded #16

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This entry was written by John A, posted on Jul 22, 2007 at 4:33 PM, filed under General. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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I apologize, my behavior obeyed to a bitter defamation and I lost my head. I already found my head and I think it’s on its place, so don’t worry about. :)

Regarding the last paragraph in your message, CO2 physics is not a matter of faith, Steve. It is a matter of… physics. CO2 cannot store heat above k = 0.01675 at the current conditions. If T increases, the density of CO2 would decrease by the decrease of its d and Pp (more heat, more diffusion because there are instabilities between molecular chemistry and quanta. The heat transfer by the earth’s atmosphere is an open system). With the last conditions, k will diminish to 0.0144. CO2 is not a collector of energy, but a conveyor of heat that relocates heat to more microstates as soon as it absorbs it. H2O-l is a sink of heat because of its high Cp.

Milesworth, where are you? Because something amusing has happened. You took exception to my pointing out that Lockwood lied in his recent paper. But, lo and behold, Lockwood has outed himself as a messianic warmer in a letter to the Telegraph newspaper:

“I am one of the authors of the Royal Society global warming paper that you say is simple and fundamentally flawed (Comment, July 15). Simple? The idea was to present a straightforward demonstration, without recourse to complex climate models. Flawed? None of the three academic referees the paper was subjected to found any flaws.

Climate change is by far the greatest threat to everyone’s standard of living. Unlike political parties, companies, media stars, works of art, consumer products and even social trends and national economies, a scientific reality is immune to spin.

Gordon Brown, the new Prime Minister of the UK, pressed by the media during his monthly news conference about the flooding in England, blamed it on “global climate change”. No wonder politicians love AGW.

Prof. Lockwood is insistent that eliminating consideration of data because it diverged from model predictons is a very bad thing.

“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged afterwards. You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said. “The key point of our paper is that since 1985 all the possible solar influences have been in the wrong direction to give warming,” said Prof Lockwood

Prof. Lockwood is insistent that eliminating consideration of data because it diverged from model predictons is a very bad thing.

All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged afterwards. You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said. “The key point of our paper is that since 1985 all the possible solar influences have been in the wrong direction to give warming,” said Prof Lockwood

The other part of this is that there has been no warming since 1998. I don’t know why this is inconsistent with some sort of lag on a possible solar influence. Has Lockwood addressed this issue anywhere?

On the other hand, Solar Irradiance has been increasing according to the data obtained by Lean et al and published by NOAA in 2001. When I read the Lean’s article in 2005 it had a graph that I reproduced without modifications in one of my articles. However, when I was revising the references of all the articles in the Biocab website I found that the NOAA pages from where I’ve taken the number of X-class solar flares had disappeared. I found the same data in the NOAA site, so I plotted that graph again and added the polynomial trends. It has been published in Biocab.org along with the data released by NOAA. That was not my only problem because the same thing was made to the graphs on TT anomalies; however, here the things were worst because the link from biocab to NOAA reports worked well, but it was directing to the reader to a damaged series of data. The intention of the author of that page of NOAA was evidently to confuse the reader because it has not legends about the origin of the data, or the authors, etc. It was a scientist from Australia who made me know the fatal error in that page. Now the question is if the twisting of data is valid in science or if it is pseudoscience. All data referring to TSI, TT, etc. was “adjusted” and changed two months before the Lockwood & Frölish article was released to the press. Have you read about one of the preferred practice of pseudoscientists which consists of making the information public firstly through Media and after through “scientific” magazines? Lockwood paper was released firstly to the Media with the support of James Hansen; after it, the article was published by the RS. However, all of the “changes” and “adjustments” made to the data in NOAA site make obvious the intention of the Loockwoodian attempt of turning off the Sun.

In desperate attempts to shore up their crumbling doctrine of man-made climate change, Professor Lockwood and Henry Davenport (Letters, July 14) themselves cherry-pick data. Prof Lockwood’s “refutation” of the decisive role of solar activity in driving climate is as valid as claiming a particular year was not warm by simply looking at the winter half of data. The most significant and persistent cycle of variation in the world’s temperature follows the 22-year magnetic cycle of the sun’s activity. So what does he do? He “finds” that for an 11-year stretch around 1987 to 1998 world temperatures rose, while there was a fall in his preferred measures of solar activity. A 22-year cycle and an 11-year cycle will of necessity move in opposite directions half the time.

The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate. Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects. Their theory has no power to predict. It is faith, not science. I challenge them to issue a forecast to compete with our severe weather warnings – made months ago – for this month and August which are based on predictions of solar-particle and magnetic effects that there will be periods of major thunderstorms, hail and further flooding in Britain, most notably July 22-26, August 5-9 and August 18-23. These periods will be associated with new activity on the sun and tropical storms. We also forecast that British and world temperatures will continue to decline this year and in 2008. What do the global warmers forecast?

Climate change is by far the greatest threat to everyone’s standard of living. Unlike political parties, companies, media stars, works of art, consumer products and even social trends and national economies, a scientific reality is immune to spin.

I wonder if Prof. Lockwood discussed this with any members of the philosophy department at his university. They would have been very itnerested in heraitng fro him what the defintive answer is on scientific reality. it is a question that has vexed philosophers for thousands of years. “Scientific reality is immune to spin”. I wonder how many nanosecods it would take for the philosphers to punch holes in that statement

Well, I fear I also have a message for Steve Milesworthy. Sorry about that, Steve. Just take your time.

Re unthreaded 15 #439

Hi Steve,

You may dismiss Professor Lindzen as much as you like but the fact is that you’re not addressing the crucial high sensitivity versus observations issue. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that:

a) Lindzen is wrong in his 75% figure (not by much, IMO) and somehow you are right in your 50% estimate.
b) Theoretical sensitivity to 2xCO2 without + or – feedbacks should be ~1 C (Lindzen has acknowledged this and so have most skeptic scientists, as far as I know).
c) There is some amount of masking in the current dT due to negative forcings (Lindzen does explicitly address this possibility in his Timbro essay).
d) There is some still unrealized warming due to ocean thermal inertia (again, Lindzen does mention this in his essay).
e) The “Iris effect” is flatly wrong.

Still, everything what I said in #427 holds.

– How do you jump from 0.7 C to 3 C?

– And what are your thoughts on the aerosols problem I described?

PS- Indeed, Lindzen has spent a long time stating his views. Already in the 90s he was making the very same point that real world warming didn’t match high sensitivity speculations, that the climate system was not particularly sensitive to trace gas CO2 and that negative feedbacks were likely at play.

There is a study, to be publish in Nature in a few days, that compares observed precipitations with computer model. I would like to know if anyone has the chance to read it, how reliable this study is since I’m very dubious to any claim that computer model can have any prediction capacity.

I have talked recently about the unusual rain for the Pacific Northwest and parts of northern California so far this month, and even Southern California is attempting to join in, with some unusual July showers from Sunday night into Monday.

Rain amounts have been extremely light, generally just a trace to a couple of hundredths of an inch of rain, and the source of the rain is not as unusual as the rain the moved through the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. While the amount of rain (and the southward extent of the rain) from storms arriving from the west at this time of year is unusual, it’s not as uncommon for moisture from the east or south to move into Southern California, which is the source of the showers.

This type of moisture is more common a little later in the summer (August/September), but moisture can sometimes sneak westward into Southern California at this time of year. The combination of an upper-level high pressure system over the Rockies and a very weak upper-level storm system just to the west of Baja California is what produced flow from the east, which allowed this area of moisture to move westward into California.

Some of the moisture will spread northward into Central and Northern California. Again, any rainfall in the lower elevations will be very light; however, locally heavy showers and thunderstorms could develop over the mountains through Tuesday.

=========

Simply put, this July has bobbled around between September-esque and October-esque weather for much of the West Coast. Mostly the latter (unlike last year, where it was straight up September-esque weather in July here). It will be interesting to witness what August brings. PDO shift anyone? Chinese aerosols anyone?

Re: 17
Steve
Yaeger’s comments about the precipitation in the Pacific NW certainly match observations on the ground. It would be interesting to see something similar regarding temperatures for the same area. Do you know of any such overview? As you know from my earlier comments, in coastal BC we have been well under the norm ever since Nov 2006 and still are.

Willis: I’m very glad to know that you share my concerns on aerosols. For some time I was worried to be the only one that seemed to care about this problem, honestly. Where was I going so utterly wrong? Then, to my relieve, I read some RC posts by F. Engelbeen and others…Still, as far as I’m aware, Hansen, Schmidt, Annan and the lot are totally unconcerned by this. I don’t get it.

#5 Dave Archibald
I think I took exception when you complained about his reference to CLIMAX data. I’d already had a more friendly discussion with Bill F about the CLOUD proposal’s use of CLIMAX data in Unthreaded 14. And in the plot in Svensmark 1997 the different sites are well correlated as Svensmark notes. But clearly those facts are unlikely to resolve your determination to libel Lockwood.

#4 Nasif
Very sorry Nasif, but we are never, ever going to agree on this so I won’t comment in case Steve McIntyre tells us off again.

#15 Mikel
For 2xCO2, models predict about 2-3C warming. Take 0.7C (warming for 50% of 2xCO2 forcing) add 0.5C “inbuilt” warming gives you 1.2. Double for a continued increase to 2xCO2 gives you 2.4C. So consistent. I’d hardly claim such a simple approach is valid, but I have a paper in front of me that does a more comprehensive analysis to come to a similar answer. I note they compare average GHG forcing over the last 40 years of the 19th vs the last 40 years of the 20th century and come to a value of 1.38W, well under 50%.

#11 Tom
What is Piers going on about British temperatures “continuing” to decline. In the UK 2006 was warmest since before 1780 by about 0.2C and the running mean on 2007 is still another 0.3C above 2006 despite the soggy July. Sadly for Piers, his flood forecast was a bit late, and all is quiet on the sun. It is now 4 days in a row with zero sunspots.

Willis: I’m very glad to know that you share my concerns on aerosols. For some time I was worried to be the only one that seemed to care about this problem, honestly. Where was I going so utterly wrong? Then, to my relieve, I read some RC posts by F. Engelbeen and others…Still, as far as I’m aware, Hansen, Schmidt, Annan and the lot are totally unconcerned by this. I don’t get it.

Would you mind reposting the GISS model link? Thanks.

Let me repost the entire unthreaded 15 #443, since the links didn’t work and posting images seems to be broken. I had said:

—————————————–

I have the same problem with aerosols you have, Mikel. The annotated GISS computer model estimate of the results of tropospheric aerosol forcing is posted at

The GISS result shows the greatest cooling effect in Europe (30-60°N, 30E-60W, blue rectangle in link). The greatest warming effect, on the other hand, is in North Africa (0-30°N, 30E-60W, red rectangle in link).

Europe shows cooling of zero up to -7 W/m2 forcing, while North Africa shows warming of zero up to +7 W/m2.

We would expect this huge difference in forcing (up to three times a doubling of CO2) to be reflected in the temperature records of the two areas, with Europe warming less than North Africa. But HadCRUT3 records show no such thing, the warming in both areas (1880-2000) is 0.05°/decade.

Other areas reveal the same thing. GISS says the area in China (30-40N, 120-130E, green rectangle in link) had a cooling from tropospheric aerosols of -6 to -7 W/m2, way more cooling than North Africa or Europe as a whole – but it warmed more than either one, 0.08°/decade.

In other words, it’s just computer games with no relationship to reality. The claims of aerosol cooling/warming are not supported by the data.

“A few watts short of an idea – Ontario move to outlaw light bulb short-sighted” by
Terence Corcoran, National Post
Published: Thursday, April 19, 2007:

“After years of failure in giving light bulbs away, the Ontario Liberals have come up with another dim bulb idea. If free won’t work, then maybe a gun will. By 2012, the province said yesterday, Ontario will “ban” the sale of inefficient household light bulbs and force the replacement of all 87 million existing bulbs in every home with new energy efficient models.”

Re: 17
Abstract
Human influence on climate has been detected in surface air temperature, sea level pressure, free atmospheric temperature, tropopause height and ocean heat content. Human-induced changes have not, however, previously been detected in precipitation at the global scale, partly because changes in precipitation in different regions cancel each other out and thereby reduce the strength of the global average signal. Models suggest that anthropogenic forcing should have caused a small increase in global mean precipitation and a latitudinal redistribution of precipitation, increasing precipitation at high latitudes, decreasing precipitation at sub-tropical latitudes and possibly changing the distribution of precipitation within the tropics by shifting the position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Here we compare observed changes in land precipitation during the twentieth century averaged over latitudinal bands with changes simulated by fourteen climate models. We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation within latitudinal bands, and that these changes cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing. We estimate that anthropogenic forcing contributed significantly to observed increases in precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, drying in the Northern Hemisphere subtropics and tropics, and moistening in the Southern Hemisphere subtropics and deep tropics. The observed changes, which are larger than estimated from model simulations, may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human health in regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel.

Re:26
The first sentence highlights the very premise of the paper. All these other things are [purportedly] caused by humans, now voila we have proof that we’re changing precipitation patterns as well. Why the period 1925 through 1999? Why not, say 1890-2005? Yet another case of chosing the boundaries so the data fits? And what to make of the actual greening of the Sahel over the past decade as observed from space?

So Willis, the aerosol adjustment is just one huge fudge factor (or let’s say the biggest fudge factor imaginable).

Is there another way to verify these figures are the actual adjustments used?

Not sure what you mean. The GISS figure I linked to are the results of the GISS computer model, showing the effect of the aerosols which they have assumed to present. I don’t know what they based their assumptions on, but those are their results, not mine.

So far South BC has only one week of summer weather, instead of full 1 month as it was usual for last 10 years. All water reservoirs are overflowing, instead of usual 50% capacity at this time of the year. River’s flow is so powerful, all my favorite fishing spots are overwhelmed with fast current, high level, and high water turbidity. Not to mention quite rare (second time on my 10 years memory) presence of black flies, leaving long-lasting holes in my hide after every trip to the mountains…

From the interview of Richard Seagar, Earth observatory of Columbia University:

“Using observations and climate models we found that, at the latitudes of Europe, the atmospheric heat transport exceeds that of the ocean by several fold. In winter it may even by an order of magnitude greater. Thus it is the atmosphere, not the ocean, that does the lion’s share of the work ameliorating winter climates in the extratropics. We also found that the seasonal absorption and release of heat by the ocean has a much larger impact on regional climates than does the movement of heat by ocean currents.

Seasonal storage and release accounts for half the winter temperature difference across the North Atlantic Ocean. But the 500 pound gorilla in how regional climates are determined around the Atlantic turned out to be the Rocky Mountains. Because of the need to conserve angular momentum, as air flows from the west across the mountains it is forced to first turn south and then to turn north further downstream. As such the mountains force cold air south into eastern North America and warm air north into western Europe. This waviness in the flow is responsible for the other half of the temperature difference across the North Atlantic Ocean.”

We got a bit off with the sizes of the squares, I’m really more interested in how many. Although some calculations would need to take size into account – number of stations average per km, ratio of water to land, contribution to total area etc. It was just an aside, that squares of a certain degree size would be smaller at the poles. But we’ll get into it.

So, back to the question and other interesting details. There are 72 15×15 squares per quadrant (6×12 or 90dx180d) so there are 288 of that sized squares. How many are cooling, how many are warming, and then of those how many of each are mostly (80%?) water and how many are mostly (80%?) land. Or even better, 5×5 or 2×2.

From what I understand, the water is calculated 2×2 and then converted somehow to 5×5 and the land is calculated 5×5. If there are 288 15×15 squares, that’s 9 5×5 per, or 2592 of them. For each 4 5×5, you can make 25 2×2, so that’s 16,200 2×2 degree squares. I’m sure if we’re measuring these things, and coming up with a global mean, somebody knows the numbers (x squares, y “water” and z “land”).

But how big are they? If we’re talking about a specific 5×5 area, the size can be calculated. Other than that, all we can really get is a general idea of what that is by generalizing (much like Oh I Don’t Know, the global mean anomaly?)

If we ignore the 2×2 for now (or forever), since there are 6 5×5 per 30 degrees, and 3 sets each direction, 36 total for 90 to -90, so there should be 72 the other, 180 to -180, which there also is. So there are 2592 5×5 areas. As to how big each is… Ballpark

In the first 30 degrees there are 864 squares (total, 432*2) and each one is a median of about 520 sq km (556-517)
In the next 30 degrees there are 864 squares and each one is a median of about 455 sq km (517-392)
In the last 30 degrees there are 864 squares and each one is a median of about 235 sq km (392-73)

Or yet another way “They range in size from 73 square kilometers to 556 square kilometers.”

Or another way, the total of Earth’s surface area is 510 million square km, so each square is an average of 197 thousand square km

If they used UTM and cut it up, there are 1200 squares 6×8 (excluding 80-90 south, 84-90 north, zones ABYZ, and 32X 34X 36X, not counting the shapes of 31V and 32V) and I’m not even going to try and figure that one out….

Remember, always show your work! Ignoring confluence and a couple other things:

There are 2592 5×5 degree sized squares on earth, ranging in size from 73 to 556 square kilometers, with areas ranging from 5.5 to 310 thousand km. This clearly makes it difficult to compare squares to each other, especially given that the majority of them cover water.

Since the earth is about 510 million km in area, that gives an average per square of about 450 square kilometers, or 200,000 km of area.

There are [number] of weather stations in the [network] network, or an average of [average] per square, or an average of [average] per [size] The square with the most stations has[number] of stations, and the square with the least, [number]

Of the stations, [percent] show a warming trend, [percent] of which are at least [percent] water and [percent] are at least [percent] land. The other [percent] show a cooling trend, [percent] of which are at least [percent] water and [percent] are at least [percent] land.

Steve, thanks for your quick answer. But perhaps it would have been better to follow my advice of taking your time to respond. You keep attributing all of the 20th century warming to GHGs, something that the IPCC explicitly avoids doing. A more reasonable approach from your side would be taking half of that warming and then you have 0.35 x 2 (since you compute 50% of 2xCO2) + 0.5 (“inbuilt” warming) = 1.2 C. This is below the canonical 1.5-4.5 (mean 3 C) figure. Where do you get the 2-3 figure from?

Note that I’m conceding that:
a) We know how much the earth has warmed in the past century (see the GHCN threads to assess how much of a concession this is).
b) Your 50% figure is correct (it’s not, IPCC gives 69% for GHGs, no matter what the rest of the forcings did).
c) There is an inbuilt 0.5 C warming for a transient warming as low as 0.35 C, which is totally unreasonable, especially when the latest measurements show no warming of the oceans.

The one thing I do agree with you is that all of this is a ridiculously simple approach. But this is the alarmists’ and IPCC’s approach! It’s based on the assumption that we know what all the relevant forcings of the climate system are and we can even assign meaningful figures to each of them for the present and for the past times… Btw, have we already figured out what triggers closer events such as ENSO, AMO, PDO,..?

Do you have any opinion on sulphate aerosol forcing estimates versus observations?

Steve Sadlov: I think that another way of assessing how questionable the Cryosphere Today information is, is looking at their land snow cover. They’ve kept using the same image of the snow-covered northern Patagonian plains for several weeks, when in fact that snow melted a long time ago. Last winter there was no snow at all in the Pyrenees for several months and then, all of a sudden, a big chunk appeared on the eastern side that lasted until late spring. The bulk of the Pyrenees snow cover is always in the central region and the western/Atlantic side also receives more snow than the eastern/Mediterranean one.

Those “satellite images” are re-processed beyond recognition. But still they can’t hide a massive SH ice cap with some parts penetrating well into the 50s region (eventually it didn’t snow in Santiago for the 3rd time this year but latest news from the crude SH 07 winter is up to 70 children dead in Peru due to extreme cold temperatures).

“We know how much the earth has warmed in the past century.” That’s not totally true. “We know how much the temperature has changed from ‘normal’, in an aggregation of the data from the sampling locations.” At best. That’s taking for granted:

a) The base period itself is both accurate and indicative.
b) The change in measurement devices over the last century have been accounted for correctly and have little or no margin of error.
c) The measurement devices are accurate and calibrated and have remained so over the period.
d) The methods by which land and sea readings are taken and combined are accurate and correct.

Do you have any opinion on sulphate aerosol forcing estimates versus observations?

I don’t have an opinion, but there was an interesting article on tracking and analyzing Chinese aerosol emission plumes over the Pacific in the Wall Street Journal last week. I only have it in hard copy and it’s currently in the recycle bag, but I could probably find it if anyone’s interested in more detail. Basically, it’s such a mixed bag of dust, sulphates and black carbon that the net effect is not at all obvious. However, if the global temperature does stop rising or even decline, it looks like the warmers are cranking up to blame it on the Chinese and say that warming will be even faster when (and I’m not holding my breath here) the Chinese clean up their act.

The influence of urban areas on convective activity is well known and has been studied for many years. A series of papers by Stan Chagnon, et al, from the Illinois Weather Survey has described these influences quite well. One might look at a 1971 paper detailing this which can be found here. Look for others in the bibliography.

Attributions of any unusual weather event to global warming have to stand the test of the “magic word”: ‘Since’.

For example in the case of the current extreme flooding in the UK, it is the worst since 1947. In other words, such occurences are not unique or unprecedented.

Once in a while you will see an extreme event characterized as the greatest of its kind ever (sometimes mischaracterized as “all-time”). ‘Ever’ does trump ‘since’, but caution is advised. One must then check the POR (Period of Record) to see if the word ‘ever’ has any real significance.

“now voila we have proof that we’re changing precipitation patterns as well.”

For the past several years the BBC has been running stories about how horribly dry things are going to become due to AGW. One would think from reading all of these stories that we would turn the world into one huge desert. Now suddenly it is raining more than usual in the UK and that is blamed on AGW as well. So as someone else pointed out in some links to stories from the FT, “which is it”?

I believe the goal at this point is to simply keep the population fearful of “climate change” period, be it warming or cooling or dry or wet, and convince them that current political leaders are responsible for it, and promise to correct the situation if only we would elect them (alternative political leaders) to office. I wouldn’t even put it past partisans to manipulate the temperature record in order to get their desired result.

Nothing much good comes from the mingling of science with politics. (except for maybe a few moon landings)

Mr. Milesworthy: Re: my comments on the previous Unthreaded, please be advised that your references do not support your assertions. I want to see results from a GCM that show an 8-9-year “flat spot” in the scary rising temperature curve that will make my backyard ocean front property. It doesn’t even work with the RIGGED “Global Average Temperature” data.

#49 Jae
I’m sure I could find such a match within the spaghetti, but to hunt for it would be a somewhat Svensmarkish way to prove a point.

But your reading of the past 9 year’s temperatures is a little simplified as they have not been “flat”. 1998 temperatures were high. 1999 & 2000 comparable to the rest of the 1990’s. This was followed by a steadier trend at a significantly warmer level. But this steady global anomaly hides a lot of different local trends.

When you say steadier trend I assume you mean no trend. Which “different local trends” do you say are being hidden by the “steady global anomaly”? Those tricksy negative local trends, they’re hiding the positive local trends from us!

I’m a “layperson” who is a constant reader of CA and find this website facinating in the level of intellectual discussion on such an important issue concerning our climate. I know that this is “off topic” but I would really appreciate if someone could explain how this could happen given the perceived direction our climate has been taking over the past 50 to 100 years.

#38 Mikel
The point which we are both agreeing on is that you cannot use such a simple argument to prove or disprove the sensitivity of the climate to CO2. I have already mentioned solar warming and aerosol cooling as being influences in #417

Sorry the 2-3 figure was water vapour-related changes alone, excluding surface albedo changes – this is based on Soden & Held, JClim 2005.

But your 69% GHG forcing change that you first stated in #414 is wrong as I noted in #417 and in more detail in #22: the paper cited in the latter notes a comparison of GHG forcings for 1957-1994 vs 1861-1900 is 1.38W (between 1.24W and 1.51W for 2-sigma) – about 40%.

#52 Alan
Jae and I have a difference of opinion with regards to the last 9 years temperatures, that’s all. He says its flat, I say it looks a bit up and down, but its really up, since 1998 was an exceptional year.

With regards to “regional” effects, I was just noting that the world isn’t simple and, for example, in the last few years we have a warming northern hemisphere and a cooling southern hemisphere (albeit in the “noise”).

Jae would like to see an exact match between models and reality, but it’s not likely to happen ever.

I think the term “forcing” is poor for describing the natural heat transfer. The term is applicable to machines or devices that force the heat transfer; for example, fans, frigorific, percolators, radiators, etc. The heat transfer in nature is not forced by any engine. I think the term was introduced to give the impression of “anthropogenic” unnatural heat transfer. I mean that the term was introduced to make the people think that climate change, global warming, etc. are “atypical” phenomena. Have you seen the large fan that forces the heat transfer from a cold system to a warm system? The list of preferred terms used by the new religion of “climate change” is long and confusing: forcing, atypical, unusual, abnormal, anthropogenic, positive feedback, negative feedback, layers, adiabatic, pumping, artificial, heat interchanger, higher than, worst of, unlikely, very likely, almost (for example “the Earth is almost a completely closed system”), etc.

#56 Nasif
Yes, a meeting was held prior to the first IPCC report to discuss the language to use. James Hansen was all for using the terms “CO2 heat ray intensity”, “anthropogenic self-destruction by heat death”, and instead of emissions scenarios, he proposed “doomsday scenarios”.

How can anybody talk about temperatures in the last “X” years if one can’t rely on individual station data and make wild adjustments willy nilly. It is all noise and adjustments are made to suit. The only reliable temperature dataset would be one that contained only well maintained rural sites that have a known history. This data shows the US is cooler now than in the 1930s and follows the solar cycles. The Bogus data is being used as a weapon against Solar affects on climate.

Just what did happen in 98? Any GCM’s predict it? Are there any GHG theories that would predict that sort of anomaly and would maybe give of a clue as to when the next big spike or dip will occur?….Thought not.

I assume you are attempting humor here, but given the similarity between this post and so many of your previous ones it becomes difficult to discern where your creativity and making up of stuff leaves off and your dependence upon fact reason begins. If you have an underlying thesis you would be well-served to state it and stick to it. As it is your posts are all over the board such that they resemble the spaghetti you disparage in #51.

Arguing for the sake of arguing, and then do the soft-shoe shuffle in #51, don’t present much of a coherent message.

The temperature record of the last 15 years can be tricky to interpret. Here are significant natural events which may be hard to untangle from any solar factor:

1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, substantial global cooling
1997 and 1999-2000 Significant La Ninas with global cooling
1998 Major El Nino with substantial global warming
1992 Atlantic switch to a state which brought large amounts of warm water to the subpolar regions, heating the Arctic ( see this link )

#49
In the first AR4 A2 model I’ve examined there is a maximum 15 year gap between annual temperature records, much longer than the current gap, and several long flat or even declining periods, especially in the first half of the output.

In the first AR4 A2 model I’ve examined there is a maximum 15 year gap between annual temperature records, much longer than the current gap, and several long flat or even declining periods, especially in the first half of the output.

Was there any explanation of this gap given in the report or do you have one handy to give us? Could that gap be something that the modelers judge to be a defect? Did the modelers input any aerosol effects?

Obviously, I’m not going to get Steve Milesworthy to address the specific flaws of his arguments and figures that I keep pointing out and he won’t say a word about the aerosols paradox. But at least he has agreed that the IPCC approach of explaining all current and past climate changes through a sum of known and quantifiable ‘forcings’ is too simplistic. Let’s leave it at that then.

Yes, a meeting was held prior to the first IPCC report to discuss the language to use. James Hansen was all for using the terms “CO2 heat ray intensity”, “anthropogenic self-destruction by heat death”, and instead of emissions scenarios, he proposed “doomsday scenarios”.

Unfortunately, he was outvoted.

Jim Hansen is a very polished politician (when he is doing his political thing as apart from his scientific thing) and knows full well the phraseology that will impact the public. He knows full well the difference between marketing AGW mitigation and overselling it.

Steve Milesworthy, if you are privy to these inputs on IPCC voting perhaps you can reveal how the terms of uncertainty and likelihood were determined by the AR4 authors.

#47 – I blame the rain on climate change! :)
Seriously, if it’s getting warmer, what better mechanism for the system to cool itself down? Just another reason I’m not terribly worried about this supposed temperature increase.

you will see it has weather and climate oscillations and is thus prone to the variability as is the earth. A lot of effort goes into looking at whether the variability of a model is similar to the variability of the earth, though they don’t claim to have captured it all.

#67 Mikel
Till you stop saying that the GHG forcings have increased 69% in the 20th Century (rather than since 1750 as the IPCC say) we aren’t going to get anywhere. I’ll take Earle’s advice and avoid tackling your aerosols bait.

Are there not arguments to prove or disprove the sensitivity of the climate to CO2? Of course there are many “arguments” which we scientists name empirical evidence to disprove the sensitivity of the climate to CO2; the point is that we are not allowed to say it. For example on this book, all the messages denoting Th-D are erased. Science is not a matter of “arguments” or “consensus”, but of observational and/or empirical verification. It’s not a religion or a TV political debate, Steve.

OK, I can see what you are referring to. Given that SC24 seems similar to the earlier ones, we should expect somewhere around 60 months from the first spotless day before the minimum occurs. That suggests some time in 2009.

We shall see, however, I suspect that some people will soon be wishing that CO2 really did cause global warming.

We’ve talked on a couple of occasions this month about the unusual nature of storms that have resulted in more rain than normal from western Washington southward to parts of Northern California. It appears as if there will be a weaker version of this type of storm over the weekend.

A storm system moving inland from the Pacific will bring a few showers to western Washington from Saturday into Saturday night, and the rain will not extend as far south as even western Oregon, let alone Northern California. And the rain with this storm system will be fairly light, with most locations likely to receive less than 0.10 inches.

Regardless of the amount of rain that falls with this weak storm, rain amounts for July will be significantly higher than normal in western Washington. Seattle has already received 182% of normal rainfall for July, with 1.44 inches. The above-normal rainfall has not extended inland to interior parts of Washington; eastern areas have had less rain than normal, which is not surprising. The rain shadow that limits winter rain in this region kept rain from the unusual storms from the west to a minimum, and the typical moisture source (from the south) has been largely limited.

The greatest deviations from normal will be found in Northern California, where rain in July is extremely rare, and one storm brought a surprising amount of rain. Redding, where normal rainfall is only 0.04 inches, has had 1.15 inch, which calculates to 230 times normal. One reader near Redding reported over two inches of rain, and another reader reported an intense thunderstorm that he believes dumped multiple inches of rain.

The storm over the weekend will certainly not replicate these events, but that will not change the remarkable nature of the rain that fell earlier in the month.

====================

For the W. Coast of N. America, north of say, 37.5 N, we’ll soon be saying, “2007, year without a summer.”

RE: #47 – At the present moment, some 85% of the USA’s land mass is either currently experiencing rain, or has it forecast for the next 12 hours. While it is normal for the 55% east of the Rockies to experience a pronounced summer precip max, and an additional 25% in the southwest quadrant to get a respectable summer amount from convection, this scenario I’ve described has gone on day, after day for several weeks. While not as extreme as the UK, we are still, by and large, as a nation, having a soggy, disappointing summer. A far cry from last year’s “oh, the horror of this global warming caused heat wave, this is but a portent of things to come.” Hmmmmmm ……

On a different (but then again, maybe not so different) topic, while the masses obsess on “Killer AGW” and its apparently nightmarish scenarios for 10 and 100 years from now, there is something exceedingly disturbing going on now:

I live in north Alabama. We have had a very strange spring/summer. First we started with the latest frost in the last 50 years, then spring/early summer turned into the driest 90ish day period since records were kept (we usually get close to 60 inches of rain a year) and now in the last 3 weeks we have gotten rain almost everyday totaling over 6 inches since around July 1. Our average highs are in the low to mid 90’s and the other day we had a cloudy day with only spotty rain with the temps in some spots not getting over 76 degrees. A very weird 3-4 months from where I sit.

A lot of effort goes into looking at whether the variability of a model is similar to the variability of the earth, though they don’t claim to have captured it all.

The visual simulation unfortunately for all that effort has the year change several times per one revolution of the earth.

I would never consider “that’s what popped out of a computer run” as a satisfactory answer to what might cause a 15 year hiatus in global warming under a scenario that pumps measured amounts of GHGs and some sulfates into the atmosphere. We do tend to want to explain a 30 to 40 year trend in rising global temperatures so why not do the same for a 15 year plateau.

Yeah, I’d not looked at the GHCN pages for so long, I forgot they were there! I do still remember having to put a missing set of parenthesis into read_gridded.f around the -5 to get it to compile, gee that was a while ago.

Back to the climate network and temps and squares.

I’m not sure if the 10% of the Earth that is covered by glaciers is counted as land (I would guess it is) or water, it’s hard to tell because although about 70% of the Earth is water, glaciers are 2-3 percent of water-wise vs 10% land-wise. So I’m just going to basically ignore them. Help on that appreciated.

We have about 1800ish of the 5×5 grids covered by ocean (11,250 SST 2×2 gridded)

Of the remaining 30%ish, 800ish grids covering about 150 million km2, GHCN lists 7820 mean temp stations (5206 with at least 20 years of data and homogeneity-adjusted) for GHCN-Monthly*.

That means, using an average 5×5 as 197K sq km2, there is about an average of about 1 ground station per 388 kilometers of area, 19.7 km2.

However, homogenized stations are only every 30.3 km2, or 1 per 920 kilometers of area, or larger, due to the minimum age discrepency between homogenized (20) and anomaly calculation (25) stations and different time periods*.

I’d imagine with some squares at 74 sq km2, and others 556 sq km2 (And the smallest ones on ice and a great number of the larger over water) this makes a more refined number pretty much impossible to calculate. Especially given that of the others, many have more than 10 in a ~200Ksqkm2 area. Also, if I take the 5206 number, if 1221 of them in the US are being used for anomalies, our measurements account for 25% of the network. That seems like far too many.

So we have a spotty, random network, with an average of 1 station per 1000 kilometer area, that favors urban areas and is 1/4 in the US, giving us our anomalies. For 30% of the equation. How many show warming or cooling and how many stations is actually in each grid, that’s another question.

* We don’t really know the number (or which are adjusted or not?):

Anomalies were calculated on a monthly basis for all adjusted stations having at least 25 years of data in the 1961-1990 base period. Station anomalies were then averaged within each 5 X 5 degree grid box to obtain the gridded anomalies. For those grid boxes without adjusted data, anomalies were calculated from the raw station data using the same technique.

1992 Atlantic switch to a state which brought large amounts of warm water to the subpolar regions, heating the Arctic

I see evidence that this is reversing. The UAH NoPol data looks like it has been flat to down for the last year or so. My bet is that certainly within two years and probably in as little as one year Arctic temperatures will be undeniably declining. See Figure 2 here and my EWMA chart of UAH NoPol lower troposphere anomaly (through March, but the trend continues in more recent data) here.

We have also a different, but not “atypical” summer, if we can call it summer. The temperatures have dropped by 10 °C below the median. We don’t consider this unusual, atypical or unprecedented. In 1983 there was an icing up in May, that summer we had rains for 6 of 10 days. As it has happened before, we could say that the climate here is getting back to normal. Nevertheless, this could deceive us, because it could be a stage of a cooling of the NH. It would be great that the European governments released the archives of the church that refers to the events happened during the medieval age to know what is the behavior of the climate before glaciations so we prepare ourselves like a species. I don’t mean that it will be catastrophic or apocalyptical, but it would be better if all the people knew how to confront those natural phenomena, especially the people from poor countries, although it could be that those people from poor countries are better prepared (even without knowing it) than us.

In the first AR4 A2 model I’ve examined there is a maximum 15 year gap between annual temperature records, much longer than the current gap, and several long flat or even declining periods, especially in the first half of the output.

I found in Figure 10.5 that a global model gave a 15 year period for scenario A2 from around 2015 to 2030 that started and ended at nearly the same temperature, but when you put all the ensembles together one sees an ever increasing temperature rise from 2000 to 2100 with no level spots for any length of time discernible. How is one supposed to read these results? Use the average values, as the report recommends, and then revert to individual results (out of 24 possible) to make a specific point? I do not know the rules of this game.

The A2 scenario as depicted in Figure 10.26 shows almost linearly increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG and an approximately linear increase in the concentration of SO2 emissions up to 2030 and then a nearly linear decrease until 2070 followed by a level concentration to 2100.

#91 Kenneth
Quick answer. The average of the results may give the likely future climate. The variability may give you an indication of the likely variability of our earth’s climate as we approach that future climate, though the fact that some are smooth and some are not suggests that not all models model variability very well yet.

Ahem, Steve Milesworthy and RichardT. My interpretation of the references you gave are summarized well by #91. I just don’t see how anyone can place much faith in “parameterized” GCMs. They are alluring to many people, because they appear so hi-tech, so complicated, so mysterious. And most importantly, there is no other real way to demonstrate AGW. Certainly the temperature records have not been cooperating for the past 8-9 years. The models have a LONG way to go.

As I said at great lengths elsewhere, we have 1 homogenized land station an average of every 1000 km or so making up 30% of the readings, and those readings are telling us the thermal characteristics of the surface “5 feet” below the thermometer and how the air mixes with those characteristics, to the limits of the device’s accuracy and calibration.

We’re tracking the anomalies of the underlying surface behavior. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know there’s more asphault and cultured grass (and better thermometers) in 2007 than there were in 1880. And more people, buildings and animals.

Yes, it does. It covers a large part of Mexico and goes North of US up to Canada, although in the last it is wider than in US and Mexico. I’d like to see the image of Africa, Asia and Europe. I got an image of Australia. Notice the gray area over Kansas and Oklahoma? There were clouds covering the area throughout the recording period that impeded to MODIS to get the measurements; however I can interpolate and it could be similar to the variation of temperature on the nearby areas.

Couldn’t find a completed Reno or LV survey on surfacestations… but I’m suspicious after words such quotes as

“The scientific evidence of global warming is incontrovertible, and Nevada is feeling the heat more intensely than most of the rest of the U.S,” said Stephen M. Rowland, Professor of Geology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Only a tiny bit of this increase in temperature can be attributed to increased urbanization the so-called urban heat-island effect,” Rowland continued. “Global warming is here, and we better get serious about confronting it.”

I don’t see what there is to explain. Irrespective of whether the climate is warming or cooling, almost all the area of existing glaciers/icefields (of substantial size) will accumulate ice and anything lying on the surface will get buried in the ice. Glaciers shrink because ice melts faster at the bottom than it accumulates at the top and not because ice stops accumulating.

And re the world temperature anomaly image. It shows a cold anomaly around the Northwest Cape in Western Australia. Curiously, that area is the only part of Australia to show a substantial positive temperature anomaly in the surface record over the last couple of months.

Jaye, here in rural western MD I had 3 mornings in a row, July 21-23 w/overnight lows of 49F (9.5C). That’s got to be close to daily record lows around here, for the warmest (on average) week of the year.

From what I understand, rapid growth in otherwise desert areas such as Las Vegas and Phoenix, which results in a variety of changes including massive reservoirs, has had dramatic effects on the local weather in such places. I.e., the areas are actually creating their own weather (of a sorts) now.

We used to see that on the coast of Florida, btw. Little micro-systems of clouds would form over the ocean near the coast, then move inland and rain (which is why Melbourne inland had 60″ of rain per year but 4 miles E on the coast had only 38″ per year).

RE: #94 – I am getting nervous about the global food supply. Note to all – you would not be unwise to, ASAP, ensure you have in your possession at least a one month food supply. Having a one year supply would be better yet.

My scientific training was as a theoretician and I have, until now, been looking in vain for a satisfying theoretical approach to AGW (or lack thereof).
At last I have found something: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Falsification_of_CO2.pdf
A paper entitled ‘Falsifcation Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics’ by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner.

#112
If you think that a greenhouse has limited value as an analogy for the trapping of heat by radiatively active gases (nobody would disagree), then try this analogy from Gerlich and Tscheuschner

The water pot on the stove. Without water filled in, the bottom of the pot will soon become glowing red. Water is an excellent absorber of infrared radiation. However, with water filled in, the bottom of the pot will be substantially colder.

Could it be that the water boils, preventing the pan from getting hotter?
This physics behind this paper has already been discussed elsewhere.

I’m a little confused about the boiling pot analogy which is described several times in the referenced Paper.
The bottom of the pot is cooled by the transfer of heat to the water mostly by conduction. In an open pot, as soon as the water reaches the boiling point, it changes to steam and rises, and is replaced by cooler, denser water. So the heat transferred to the water by conduction is carried up autoconvectively and out of the system in the form of steam. Eventually, all of the water boils off and the base of the pot can once again glow red. It is my impression that radiational tranfer of energy has little to do with this.

I’d hardly call that a “discussion”… what, three paragraphs to sum up an entire 88 page paper and all he found was two or three problems? Even at that, most of the comments seem to think the blogger is wrong, not the other way around. Hmmm…

123: RichardT, it looks like you have not fully read that paper, or you do not understand it. It makes complete shambles of GHG theory, both empirically and theoretically. There must be 10 good arguments there against the notion that Earth somehow behaves like a greenhouse. Convection and conduction are the important mechanisms, not radiation.

Atmospheric megacryometeors could be a new type of fingerprint (geoindicator) of Climate Change. Global Warming might be making the tropopause colder, moister and more turbulent, creating conditions in which ice crystals could grow, forming, unusually and much more recurrently, large ice conglomerations.

IF you’re doing audits and verifications, adversarial articles like G and T are not really relevant. One has to focus on mainstream articles. I do not accept the G and T assertion that an explanation is impossible. That’s why I’m interested in the best mainstream expositions, I’m not interested in characterizations by skeptics right now.

Again, I would encourage readers to spend more time familiarizing themselves with mainstream articles than with skeptical articles. For example, John Daly was very skeptical of the HS, but his approach wasn’t conducive to diagnosing what was wrong with MBH. To do so, you have to wade through what Mann actually did – principal components, bristlecones etc. – and talking about how Mann’s articles were inconsistent with Hubert Lamb was interesting but not relevant to an assessment of the type that I do.

I very seldom discuss “skeptical” articles on this site for that reason, although many readers bring them up. Mostly I try to analyze recognized mainstream articles. (I do not view analysis of surface stations as “skeptical” – the efforts of surfacestations.org are audit oriented: do the surface stations meet NOAA representations of being “high quality”.)

BTW, Gerlich and Tscheuschner cite a Dept. of Energy paper (ref. 91) that supposedly forms the basis for IPCC’s view on GHGs (although they also say that some climate scientists are now making assumptions that are not allowed by the DOE paper). Maybe that could serve as a kernel for a discussion of these issues.

The MAcCRacken reference is a good one. I ran across this about 3 years ago when I was trying to figure out where the 4 wm-2 forcing figure came from. IPCC uses this figure but none of the references derive this figure. It appears as though by magic. THere is a derivation of the figure, but it wasn’t easy to find. I located the derivation via the MacCracken reference which I stumbled on in the stacks at U of T library.

When it comes to prescipitation,
I took the data from “http://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/web/en/climate/climate_since_1864/homogeneous_data.html”
they have not only the temperature, but too, prescipitation since 1864,
for most of them, prescipitation is about or just east of a 20-25 years minumum.

For Switzerland, at least, decreasing temperatures, increasing prescipitation should be expected
over the next 15-20 years.

I still have not enough datas for increase/retreat of glaciers of switzerland. Still searching.
Because I wouldn’t be surprised, when they will follow the prescipitation pattern.

Bill Gray’s op-ed in the WSJ on 7/26 inspired me to do an up-to-date Exponentially Weighted Moving Average plot of the UAH lower troposphere NoPol global (land plus water) temperature anomalies. I have included a gaussian (Why gaussian? Seemed like a good idea at the time.) plot that I eyeball fitted to the data. Note that for the data before 1994, the trend is actually slightly negative, but it’s not statistically significant so I didn’t include it. I’m using an exponential weighting factor of 0.08 so the group delay is on the order of 6 months (probably somewhat less because more recent points are more heavily weighted). After looking at the plot, it may take more than two years to convince the masses that Arctic temperatures have peaked:

For a longer instrumental temperature series that shows how much warmer it was from 1935 to 1945 here’s a plot from the Warwick Hughes site of Hadley data(I assume from the Jones citation):

Yes that paper has indeed been discussed elsewhere by someone who really does not have much of an idea about the natural direction of heat flow. I had originally though he merely misspoke but as it turns out he really does have a serious misconception about it. Now I’m wondering just how widespread such misconceptions are.

Steve Sadlov, the GFS model shows a cool front (actually just a wind shift line with slightly drier air) near Miami, Florida on August 1. That, if it happens, would be quite rare and can be added to the list of strange 2007 weather events.

The global temperature anomaly over the last seven days is given here . One has to mentally shrink the distorted polar areas (India is 50% larger than Greenland but you’d never guess that by the map) to get a proper view. The global temperature is actually rather balanced at the moment, with roughly offsetting regions of anomalous coolness and warmth.

Contrast that with the global temperature anomaly for the last 365 days ( link ). (Note that the scale is different from the first map.) The 365-day map shows few regions of anomalous coolness, with the warm areas greatly outweighing the cool.

#52 Alan
Jae and I have a difference of opinion with regards to the last 9 years temperatures, that’s all. He says its flat, I say it looks a bit up and down, but its really up, since 1998 was an exceptional year.

Well, as y’all know, I’m an inveterate investigator of curious relationships. I kept hearing people saying “the temperature hasn’t risen since 1998″, to which the AGW supporters say “Yeah, but 1998 was an El Nià±o year, so it’s no surprise that it was so high, that’s why the temperatures look flat”.

So I decided to see what the temperature data looks like with the El Nino trend removed. There are several measures of El Nino strength, including the ENSO (El Nià±o – Southern Oscillation) Index, the BEST (Bivariate Enso Timeseries) Index, the El Nià±o 3-4 Index, and the MEI (Multivariate Enso Index).

Of these, the MEI has the best relationship with the HadCRUT3 temperature (r^2 = 0.24). Accordingly, I regressed the MEI on the temperature and removed the effect of the El Nià±o variations from the temperature record. Here are the results, showing the HadCRUT3 temperature record (blue), and the same record with the El Nià±o effect removed :

A few things of interest:

1) After removing the El Nià±o variations, temperatures since 1998 are flatter than they are when the variations are included.

2) There appears to have been a change in the relationship between El Nià±o and temperature that coincides with the PDO change in 1976.

3) Year to year variations since 1998, discounted for El Nià±o, have been smaller than the historical norm.

All in all, I’d say that the idea that the temperatures are still rising since 1998 is doubtful … removing the El Nià±o variations flattens the data out rather than confirming a rise.

The reason the pot becomes red hot is because it can’t transfer enough heat away to the surrounding air through

a) the surrounding ait through natural convection
b) to the cooker/other objects in the room through radiation

When its full of water, the water absorbs most of the heat it is receiving firstly through natural convection and subsequently turbulent convection (when large bubbles are formed and circulate within the pot as the gases dissolve within the water are released. Eventually the bulk o fthe water reaches boiling point and the bulk of the heat is lost through latent heat of change from water to steam (provided the pot isn’t sealed). This process continues until all the water is boiled away and we eventually end up with a red hot bottomed pot.

Good work Willis. On the PDO, I’m curious as to what it actually is. I understand it relates to the poleward of 20N SST anomaly, and is detrended of the Global Warming trend. Also, it appears to correlate remarkably well with periods of global warming and cooling.
If you detrended world temperature data of the global warming trend, I imagine you would get a similar graph to that you see for the PDO, as global warming has not been perfectly linear, rather it oscillates around the linear trend (ie positive ~1915-1945, negative ~1945-1978, positive ~1970-2000ish).
So, is the PDO simply a manifestation of global warming (ie global warming causes the PDO oscillation), or does the PDO drive global warming?

RE #147 Alan there is pretty good evidence that the PDO exisitng well before the 20’th Century. So, I’d say the PDO isn’t caused by AGW but rather it’s a natural oscillation which is mostly independent of AGW, at least so far.

The cool-phase PDO pattern is illustrated in these extended SST forecasts . In the north Pacific note the warmth in the middle and the horseshoe of coolness surrounding that central warmth. You have to use some imagination because the pattern isn’t perfect, but it’s clearly there.

The coolness along California and into the eastern subtropics is very important. That coolness increases the marine stratiform cloudiness and that large-scale increase in low cloud cover tends to cool the earth a bit. Also, the coolness reinforces trade winds which tends to increase the chances of cool La Ninas, again cooling the earth a bit.

Re #145 Willis thank you for creating the chart. Very interesting.

The other big global oscillator is in the Atlantic (AMO or AMM). The Atlantic switched to its warm phase beginning about 1992, putting lots of warm water into the subpolar regions as well as warming a broad stretch of the lower-latitude Atlantic.

There are also large volcanos (El Chicon and Pinatubo) one of which masked a substantial El Nino and the other which dropped global temperatures for several years in the early 1990s.

I have no idea how to remove those from the global trend but they’re there.

The AMO should be peaking about now as well. We could well see temperatures returning to near the 1950 to 1975 level in the next decade or two. If this even begins to happen, watch the warmers abandon the global temperature metric and begin touting the heat content metric.

Steve Sadlov,

Recently I saw a couple of references to Spitzbergen being accessible by sea for over 200 days (considered a ‘climate improvement’ at the time) in the early part of the twentieth century compared to less than 100 in the 19 century. Spitzbergen has significant coal deposits that can only be transported by sea, btw. I tried looking for the current conditions, but didn’t have much luck. Do you know where I can find this information?

On 26th July, they put out another breathless press release, Record-breaking rainfall figures. This one says that the May to July 2007 period has been the wettest May to July since records began in 1766.

It must be really nice to be able to pick whichever reference period you like to create a nice new record and know that none of your colleagues will say anything because its all about climate change. June certainly was a very wet month. In fact it was the 8th wettest June since 1766*. But why mention that when records, not science, is the name of the game?

It is very sad to see a once revered national institution compromise its integrity like this.

David, I’m not referring to ‘A’GW, just GW. And I’m sure global T’s were oscillating before the start of the 20th C. So its interesting to speculate, between PDO and GW, which is the chicken and which is the egg.

A fascinating graph, but, alas, it starts too late. You didn’t by any chance look to see what happened earlier? Even HADCRUT3 shows ‘global warming’ beginning around 1910 — if you take out the horrible and, IMHO, indefensible bucket correction. My real interest would be to see the period 1935 to 1950, which covers a phase where CO2 went down but temperatures continued to rise.

I found it here. The paper is 114 pages and does not appear to be peer reviewed – although the authors seem to have discussed their thoughts with others and have made some changes to the original paper dated July 7, 2007. Version 2.0 is dated July 24, 2007. Both of the authors appear to have written peer reviewed papers in years past but not a great many of them. I would love to see what Lubos Motl has to say about this paper.

for what I believe to be a better true picture of temperature changes during that period. In 1939 there is a temperature blip which lasts more or less until 1945ish. It shows beautifully in the NH SST graphs.

I have a vague memory of seeing some CO2 figures in tabular form, with levels dropping slightly from … sort of 310.5 to 310.3 (I’ve lost the reference, rats!)

Searching for that found another graph for which I have lost the reference — atmospheric CO2 rising while anthropogenic C is falling markedly — I reckon it might yield some data if the corrections are removed, but it looks rather savagely smoothed at the moment. I’m still thinking about that one. If only I’d copied down where I got it from….

Suppose that Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner have not more peer reviews than their professional thesis, and suppose that the paper has not peer reviewed. If their work matches with the scientific knowledge and the mathematical procedures and application of the physics is correct, in that case the paper is scientific and trustworthy. It is as a teacher who instructs his pupils in sciences without other peer review than his professional thesis.

The myth of the peer reviews is just that, a myth used to exclude the works from other no AGWer scientists that have demonstrated that the global warming is natural. Perhaps the physics procedures lose their validity for that reason? Aren’t there thousands of scientists that can review their procedures and determine if the released information is wrong? In present days, we know how the censorship has invaded the academies to prevent the publication of any work demonstrating other causes of GW than anthropogenic GHG. Only few societies have not been politicized to that extreme and are giving room for honest papers. However, I challenge to any AGWist to demonstrate that the investigation of Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner is incorrect from the Physics viewpoint. Perhaps someone wouldn’t like it merely because it says that there is not “global warming”?

Sorry, Dr. Steve McIntyre, I know this is not what you are looking for; hoever, don’t you agree on my arguments?

Maybne you could link to the graphs your looking at, because I have NEVER seena graph that showed falling CO2 in the mid 20th century, and most graphs show falling temperatures, although some process it and show flatlines.

But again I have NEVER seen a graph like you mention. You’ll have to reference something.

Julian Flood is right. All the graphs plotted from Mauna Loa data show those seasonal declines of carbon dioxide. Nonetheless, it’s hard to find those graphs at this moment. I don’t know what happened to the Internet.

There was a dramatic decline of atmospheric carbon dioxide between 1875 and 1958 that was interpreted like a gap in the proxies. However, the gap didn’t exist and the authors of the graph simply moved the data toward the coordinates where the data from Mauna Loa -which begun quite later than the measurements deduced from stomata, foraminifera, Ca isotopes, Fe stains, sedimentary rocks, shells, ice cores, etc. – could match with the last peak before the gap (83 years). The declining of CO2 disappeared; however, an explanation was never disclosed before the scientific community. It was something like saying… “Well, we have a large gap of 83 years. Just move the line to the right quadrant so the gap does not give the impression of discordance with our idea”. You know, if they had left the gap on their graphs, there wouldn’t be an explanation for the global warming between 1910 and 1940. I took the information to draw my graphs from Science Magazine and I didn’t close the gap, so you can see undamaged graphs, exactly like those graphs were published in their raw reality.

BTW, I’m still waiting for RichardT to tell me why the Holocene Epoch is not comprehended by the Quaternary Period and why the last 10000 years are not into the Holocene Epoch.

The graph I’m looking at is called Annual CO2 Emissions and Atmosphere Change. It’s a gif as saved and I can’t find it on search.

.3 ppm fall is .6Gt of … some say carbon, some CO2, I am now confused…. During the period when the atmospheric Co2 fell by .6Gt, anthropogenic production went up by .4Gt. So, suddenly, the ecosystem of poor old Earth managed to consume an extra 1Gt even though we are told that the ppms were previously going up because the ecosystem was overloaded and could only consume half the increase. Can this be right? (and why half? Is this a law of nature? Produce 10 Gt and 5 goes into the atmosphere, produce 2 and only one does. Why?)

I’d love to see clean (un-adjusted, unsmoothed) graphs from 1935 to 1950 covering atmospheric CO2, NH SSTs (verified by comparison with lighthouse data from west-facing lighthouses) anthropogenic CO2 production and delta C13. Is albedo too much to hope for as well? During the period of interest we conducted a major climate experiment, albeit inadvertently. I’m amazed no-one has looked at it more closely.

#164
I think your referring to Jaworowski difficulties with understanding how the ice bubbles in a core can be younger than the surrounding ice matrix. Simply, the bubbles take some time to close completely and seal their contents.

The Holocene is the last 11.5 ka. Only in uncalibrated radiocarbon years is it 10ka (or if you round to 1 significant figure).

Anybody who agrees with Gerlich and Tscheuschner’s non-peer reviewed preprint needs to be able explain why lead melts on the surface of Venus.

“The Holocene Epoch includes the last 10.000 years of the Quaternary Period.”

You say,

“The Holocene is the last 11.5 ka. Only in uncalibrated radiocarbon years is it 10ka (or if you round to 1 significant figure).”

Did you read the word “includes”? “Includes” means that the period of “the last 10000 years” is into the Holocene Epoch. If you think it is an error, I would suggest you to make Wallace Broecker to know your discovery because he mentioned it in his “peer review” published in Science Magazine (Vol. 291; issue No. 5508; pp. 1497-1999. 23 Feb. 2001).

Another of the 2007 weather oddities is the relative lack of wind in the Arctic this summer.

Winds have been running about 2m/s below normal, which may not sound like much, but that’s maybe 60% of normal. The windspeed anomaly chart for the last 30 days is here .

This is probably related to the anomalous high pressure which has been present in the Arctic this summer.

The effect seems to be less evaporative cooling and mixing of the open portions of the Arctic Ocean, which is making the ocean surface considerably warmer than normal. This shows up in the SST anomaly map . Conversely, the upper ocean (below the surface) is probably cooler than normal due to less heat mixed from the surface.

What this means for ice extent is hard to figure. It could affect summertime fog and low cloud formation, ice movement/breakup, radiation of heat into space, precipitation and so forth. My guess is that slower wind results in a net cooling due to greater outgoing longwave radition from the surface due to higher temperature, but a case can also be made for a net warming.

Is anything odd on melting point of lead? It is 327.5 °C and the temperature of Venus’ surface is 484.85 °C. The high pressure of Venus atmosphere is another factor that influences on melting temperatures. The best explanation for the Warming on Venus is not the GHG, but the gravitational oscillations by the expansion-contraction of the planet. Besides, one day of Venus takes 243 Earth’s days. Imagine! Each hemisphere of Venus faces the heat from the Sun through 121.5 terrestrial days! What would be of Earth if its spin was like the rotational period of Venus? Probably Earth wouldn’t have oceans or water in its liquid phase. Besides, Venus has been warming up by the last 30 years; to be precise, the climate on Venus is changing at the same time than on Earth and other bodies of the solar system.

#172
Contrary to what you state, Broecker’s article does not state that the Holocene is 10,000 years long. Only by naively assuming that figure 1 spanned the full Holocene could you make this interpretation. Is this the only article you’ve read on the Holocene?
It is fairly common in popular articles to describe the Holocene as being 10ka long, rather than it’s true length of 11.5 ka, but I thought your pages were supposed to be scientific.
Regardless, this was a minor issue on your page. The serious problem was your incorrect assertion that the early Holocene was globally 6°C warmer. There is no evidence for this, and plenty that contradicts it.

#175
Nasif, you really ought to check at least some of your facts before posting.

gravitational oscillations by the expansion-contraction of the planet

We are discussing Venus, not Io. Gravitational heating on Venus is negligible.
The diurnal temperature range on Venus is nearly zero, so the long days cannot account for the high temperature on Venus today.

So I’m still seeking an explanation why the temperature on Venus is over 400°C without invoking the greenhouse effect.

So I’m still seeking an explanation why the temperature on Venus is over 400°C without invoking the greenhouse effect.

Actually, if you’re going to criticize someone you should do yourself a favor and read the paper as well. If you have, then you weren’t paying attention. The GT paper makes it very clear they’re referring to a trace gas situation, under relatively low pressure to boot, which is not what is going on with Venus. I.e. the conditions on Venus are so radically different than they are on the surface of the earth that drawing any analogies, or conclusions as a result, is fundamentally flawed and at best, a strawman.

A fascinating graph, but, alas, it starts too late. You didn’t by any chance look to see what happened earlier? Even HADCRUT3 shows global warming’ beginning around 1910 ‘€” if you take out the horrible and, IMHO, indefensible bucket correction. My real interest would be to see the period 1935 to 1950, which covers a phase where CO2 went down but temperatures continued to rise.

JF

I agree with your desire, and I almost always show my graphs as far back as there is data, because it is always helpful to get a historical context. But unfortunately, the MEI index is only available back to 1950, which perforce is thus the starting date of my graph.

I see you like to put things in the mouth of others… Again, where in my article I state that the Holocene period is 10000 years? Those are your words, not mine. I wrote in my article:

“The Holocene Epoch includes the last 10.000 years of the Quaternary Period. The beginning of the Holocene was marked by the end of a glaciations of the Pleistocene and by the occurrence of multiple climatic changes that affected the distribution of the vegetation causing an extinction of many mammals that flourished during the Pleistocene; for example, the mammoth, deinotherius, the fleecy rhino (Coelodonta), etc. Some subspecies of humans disappeared before, during the Pleistocene, like Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (man of Neanderthal, but you can call with confidence Homo neanderthalensis because she has been recognized by the geneticists as a species different from ours).”

You wrote:

““The Holocene is the last 11.5 ka. Only in uncalibrated radiocarbon years is it 10ka (or if you round to 1 significant figure).”

You assumed that I wrote what you say, but I didn’t, You did it. Broecker plotted the Fe stains graphs and he only took the data from 10000 years ago to date (Broeker’s graph).

Nasif, you can write that the Holocene includes the last three seconds of the Quaternary for all I care, but why don’t you discuss the substantive error in your piece, that the early Holocene was 6°C warmer than modern globally?

Place your hand about 20 centimeters over the flame of a candle. Now rotate your hand very slowly, calculating to spend one hour in turning the palm of your hand in opposition to the heat source. Now spend another hour in rotating your hand to the original position. Was your hand burned? I hope not, because our experiment has not finished yet… Now place your hand at 10 centimeters over the flame. Repeat the rotating operation, but now spend 243 hours on rotating your hand. Please, tell me the results of the experiment.

The laws of ThD are the same everywhere, Richard, what changes are the conditions; call them microstates.

I hate to do this, but I have to drive you to the book Evolutionary Paleobiology by D. Jablonsky, D. H. Erwin and J. Lipps. As I wrote in my article, “The temperature was warm in general – with fluctuations up to 6 °C above the average standard of the last 150 years, with periods of extreme cooling, like the glacial period that happened 8000 years ago and, most recently, the Medieval Little Ice Age, which occurred from 1570 to 1830 AD.”

You know, a fluctuation is not the same than an anomaly. Regarding anomalies, I wrote in my article that “The previous period to the Medieval Little Ice Age was marked by a global warming similar to those previous warm periods that happened through the whole planet. The fluctuation of the Medieval Warm Period was above 0.62 °C at a global level.” Broecker wrote in his article that “If this rise could be attributed entirely to air temperature, the required warming would be between 0.5° and 0.6°C.”, which is compatible with which I wrote.

#190
Have you forgotten what you wrote on your own web site? Let me remind you

… the anomalies in the temperature were 12 times higher than the higher deviation registered in our days (in the Holocene Epoch it was higher than 6 °C, while in present times it has been no higher than 0.52 °C).

The diurnal temperature range on Venus is about 0 C, while on Earth is about 10 C to 20 C. The difference is because Earth has plants and oceans. Take the example of Titan with its dense atmosphere of the super-GHG methane and ethane. It shows a surface temperature mean of -178 °C. If distance and sidereal rotation has nothing to do, then Titan would be a scorched planet.

You’re right. That’s precisely what happens on Titan. Titan has an atmospheric pressure at surface of 1500 mbar (1.5 times the Earth’s atmospheric pressure). If the pressure of Titan were 1000 mbar, its temperature would be about -267 °C. BTW, Titan is also experiencing global warming.

Nobody wants to believe the scientifically supportable easy answer… it doesn’t jive with their dogma. Instead, they concoct ever more complicated, and indefensible, hypotheses in order to justify their ends.

Just like magic. And there I was, thinking that the planet’s surface was warmed by the sunshine, when you write that it is pressure of the overlaying gas that makes it so hot.

Strawman. Not what I or Nasif said. The pressure difference between Venus and the earth is the biggest difference. The earth does have water, which does hold heat rather well, which was also pointed out by the GT article and you’ve now gone full circle and tried to ignore. That was the point of their analogy that you apparently still don’t understand. I guess you and Boris took classes at the same school.

Nasif and others, as I’ve mentioned before on numerous occasions, I try to focus this site on mainstream articles rather than “skeptical” articles, as that is more consistent with an audit/verification objective. I don’t have the time or energy right now to go through G and T or similar articles and I don’t wish this site to be perceived as relying on or endorsing this article. It would be far more fruitful to base discussion of these topics on mainstream literature. Be critical of it if you wish, but that’s where you need to start.

Suppose your personal auditor comes in and tells you that he takes the absolute value of your credits adds them to the absolute value of your debits and calls that your net worth. This will make it easier to get loans.

When the lender’s auditor comes he disputes that method of calculating net worth.

So the question is: did the lender’s auditor perform an auditing function or was your accountant correct since there were no arithmetic errors?

True. The auditor doesnt just check math. Having sat before the infernal effin bastards
I can tell you they check your eyes, your squirming, your averting gaze, the sweat
on your forehead, and your repeated requests to visit the mens room….

At first blush that would be impossible you simply can’t get more out than you put in. Now having said that you might get such a result if you conflate reflection and radiation.

Well, Jupiter seems to radiate away more energy than it receives from the Sun.

I have seen a statement in the Cambridge Planetary Guide that simply asserts, without any supporting reference, that Venus does not radiate away more energy than it is receiving from the Sun.

Any excess, of course, would have to be provided from processes within the planet. There are references around the internet to an old article (circa 1981) in New Scientist to the effect that the Pioneer space probes, or some such, showed that. I am trying to determine if the issue is settled or not. It is clear that some of the sites I stumbled across are by kooks, but it is not clear they all are. There are many references to active vulcanism on Venus and its surface being continually being remade, so things seem interesting with respect to Venus.

Well, Jupiter seems to radiate away more energy than it receives from the Sun.

Jupiter is a tad larger than Venus and it is still collapsing that is to say still in planet forming stage it’s still cooling and that heat has to go somewhere. That is one theory there are others so have fun checking them out. It really does not make much sense to compare planets where such diverse physical systems are operating.

Your observation about the futility of comparing planets with so diverse physicochemical characteristics is acceptable.

If we keep in mind that the planetary formation leads to an increase of the mass of that object, we observe that the process releases heat.

Jupiter is devoid of inner thermal sources and it is supported against gravitational collapse by repulsive electrodynamic forces.

The mass of Jupiter is ca. 0.001 Earth’s mass. If the mass of Jupiter were growing, its Gravitational Energy Density (GED) would compete over the atomic electrostatic repulsion (AER). If GED prevailed over AER, then the main source of pressure would be the quantum pressure of electrons. The last would be the main source of heat on Jupiter.

However, the AER is overcoming the GED and so it is that the main source of heat of Jupiter is the AER, although it is not the only source.

Just a couple of points. First on the ideal gas law, PV = nRT. If you compress a given mass of gas then it will heat, but note that that’s different than claiming that the pressure CAUSES the temperature in any given situation such as the case of Venus. If you substitute 100K for say, 500K, then the same gas will be either under less pressure or take up a smaller volume. But while measuring the pressure of CO2 in the Venusian atmosphere will tell you the temperature [insert various caveats], the reason that pressure exists or alternatively the reason for the temperature must come from some other source and insolation and GHG concentrations will be figured into that reason.

OTOH, given that the CO2 concentration is 250,000 times that of earth this is still only 18 doublings. So, assuming the log-linear concentration vs temperature increase and assuming a doubling of CO2 produces a 1.5 deg K temperature increase (remember you can’t have a H20 positive feedback on Venus since the requisite H2O doesn’t exist there) then we’d expect a 27 deg K increase from GHG effect. Since Venus’s surface temperature minus Earth’s surface temperature is much larger than that, then most of the difference must come from other sources, primarily the increased insolation and the clouds which reflect back IR to the surface. BTW, how much of the thermal energy of the surface is emitted as IR on Venus? It’s certainly not going to be primarily long-wave IR. And there may be a fair amount of visible light in the mix, albeit almost all red light. Could someone work that out for us?

#213 Dave
Agree with you about PV=nRT. The air in my garage is at 15psi, the air in the tyres of my car is 30psi, and in the tyres of my bike is 50psi, but they’re all at the same temperature. Mark T take note.

With regard to CO2, Raypierre on realclimate had a comment on the logarithmic relation of CO2 stating that it changes at higher concentrations, leading to higher sensitivity:

Actually, the logarithmic behavior of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere only applies over a limited (but rather extensive) range of concentrations. At very low concentrations (say, around 1 ppm) bands are unsaturated and OLR becomes more sensitive to CO2 than in the logarithmic range. At sufficiently high concentrations (say, when you start to get around 10% or 20% of CO2 in the atmosphere) the absorption starts to be dominated by weak bands that have a different probability distribution than the bands that dominate in the present climate; this again starts to lead to an increase in sensitivity.

Why do you want to use the environment of Venus to observe CO2 effects when you already have the past experience of the Earth to demonstrate the results from dramatic changes in the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentrations?

The Arrhenius greenhouse equations require warming when CO2 concentrations increase and cooling when CO2 concentrations decrease. In reality, the Earth has experienced: (1) increased CO2 concentrations while the reported average global temperature increased; (2) increased CO2 concentrations while the reported average global temperature was relatively unchanging, and (3) increased CO2 concentrations while the reported average global temperature decreased; (4) decreased CO2 concentrations while the reported average global temperature decreased; (5) decreased CO2 concentrations while the reported average global temperature was relatively unchanging; (6) decreased CO2 concentrations while the reported average global temperature increased.

How can the Arrhenius greenhouse law and its derivatives have any validity as a dominant climate forcing when it requires climate warming with increases of CO2 and cooling with decreases of CO2 while actual experience has demonstrated such warmings have failed to occur on numerous and prolonged occassions in Earth’s past?

Irrespective of the amount of CO2 on other planets, they surely have had long enough to equilibrate. They can only heat up more if exothermic reactions take place in them, or if the solar irradiance or cosmic events increase.

I do not think I have yet seen a paper that considers the constancy or otherwise of the earth’s thermal gradient or its contribution to the present Earth temperature, including the sea floor, deep and shallow. Question: What makes a volcano appear at one place and not another, or everywhere? Answer, the interior earth is in thermal motion. Heat conduction to the surface then air conduction/convection will affect temperature sensors 1.5 m above ground. What is its magnitude? Why do we forever concentrate on temperature instead of heat dynamics?

It is more than a little bizarre to use the other planets to describe GHG warming on Earth. If the other planets did not exist, does that mean we could not determine GHG warming on Earth as a discrete system? It is more than bizarre, it is idiotic.

I’m not quite sure I understand you might be a language problem. i have no doubt that early in the process of planetary formation accretion (increasing the mass) but once there is no more material about the collapsing continues and the density only increases. Since the system thereby goes to a lower energy state heat is given off. As I said this is just one theory there are a number about I have no idea which is right.

I just wanted to point out that there is a reasonably high probability that what is happening with Jupiter is in no way comparable with that which is happening on Earth, Venus, Mars or Triton.

How can the Arrhenius greenhouse law and its derivatives have any validity as a dominant climate forcing when it requires climate warming with increases of CO2 and cooling with decreases of CO2 while actual experience has demonstrated such warmings have failed to occur on numerous and prolonged occassions in Earth’s past?

Agree with you about PV=nRT. The air in my garage is at 15psi, the air in the tyres of my car is 30psi, and in the tyres of my bike is 50psi, but they’re all at the same temperature. Mark T take note.

richardT asked for a simple explanation of something obviously more complicated than a simple equation, I provided one, and yet here you gripe. The other “variable” in the ideal gas law is n, or the amount of gas. Also, there’s a big difference between the air in your tires and the 1300 PSI on Venus, particularly since it is a _closed_ system in your tires. The amount of gas in 1 cc in your tires is much greater than 1 cc in the garage. A similar relationship will hold between the earth and Venus, though obviously not exactly the same. Note that Venus is not 93 times hotter, only about 2x hotter (in Kelvins). Steve Milesworthy, take note, and please try to remember the nit known as “context.”

There’s also a rather pronounced difference between the insulating layer on the earth compared to the crust, though that is probably minor overall. The shortest answer, as has been pointed out by others, is that the earth and Venus are different enough that direct comparisons don’t necessarily hold.

RE: #127 – Let us assume for the sake of argument that indeed, that firstly, there is AGW and secondly that it has resulted in an increase to the (expected) net annual positive energy budget equatorward of 37.5 degrees latitude. I therefore submit that ice balls / cryometeors are a negative feedback mechanism not accounted for in the GCMs. One of a number of such unaccounted mechanisms.

RE: #136 – What you’ve got there may be a nice stealth metric for PDO strength. Well done! My interpretation would be, positive PDO in the rising limb of the gaussian, and a negative PDO on the falling limb.

I think what people are suggesting is that your reference to PV=nRT as an explanation for Venus’s higher temperatures is not relevant.

And they’re wrong. Increase the pressure without an exactly similar increase in the number of particles, n, in a gas, and the temperature goes up. It cannot get any simpler than that. The tire analogy is ridiculous because it has a (relatively) closed volume, which results in a larger value for n, and hence the balance between temperatures.

“Not only are the graphs strikingly similar, the trend rates are nearly identical. Analyzing the monthly, rather than annual, data for greater precision, and accounting for the effect of autocorrelation, the indicated trends with their error ranges are:

The trend rates are nearly the same! The difference between the computed trends is much smaller than the uncertainty in the calculations. So, for all intents and purposes, these two stations indicate the same trend during the modern global warming era.

Surfacestations.org calls the Orland station a “well-sited” station and Marysville a “not-so-well sited” station, and displays them prominently to give the impression that “good” data indicate cooling while “bad” data indicate warming. It’s ironic that when you look at the actual data, during the modern global warming era Orland indicates more warming than Marysville.

Imagine that.

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Thanks Willis,
That was a very interesting graph. I wonder if Hadley has the data seperated by hemisphere? It would be interesting to see the trends (El Nino removed) for the SH since 1998. I would suspect that NH has warmed, but the SH has cooled -with the 5 year Gaussian average being somewhat flat. It sure looks that we are on the cusp of a PDO change.

#232 MarkT
Yes, if you compress a gas, it will get hotter. But then it will cool back towards equilibrium. That’s how a fridge works.

Venus is at the temperature it is, not because of its pressure, but because at that temperature it is radiating away the amount of solar heat it absorbs – simple as that. That’s how a planet works and that’s how a radiator in your car works (at equilibrium). CO2 is only relevant to how the surface temperature relates to the radiating temperature of Venus.

You, and richardT, are trying to extrapolate a simple relationship to a dynamic system… one that has a relatively constant influx of energy. Not a whole lot different than Boris trying to understand the solubility of gas in a liquid. Certainly it is much more complex than either you or I have stated, but that was intentional on my part _because that’s what richardT asked for_! Sheesh, there’s so much straw running around I’d expect a cornfield full of crows to be nearby.

It appears Anthony posted up copies of the graphs of the unadjusted data actually provided by GISS.

Tamino attempted to use the adjusted monthly data from GISS and do the yearly calculations himself, even though GISS provides the yearly totals on the same page. He also left out numerous random years of data. I counted more than 20 years missing just for Marysville. I’m not surprised he came up with a different graph. It doesn’t reflect reality though.

By using the adjusted data, Marysville would have been adjusted to be a better match to the surrounding stations.

I’m sorry, Mark T, but in this case Steve Milesworthy is exactly correct. Well, exactly within the parameters being considered at any rate. Yes there are more complications which would have to be considered if this were a discussion in a scientific paper, but the only way a compressed gas would maintain the temperature gained while it was being compressed would be if it in some sort of perfect vacuum bottle. Otherwise any initial extra heat will be dissipated to the surroundings, which in the case of a planet means to space. Ultimately, of course, this would reduce the atmospheric temperature to the 3 deg K of space. But since Venus is near the star Sol, the venusian atmosphere can only drop to the temperature at which the insolation is balanced by the radiation to space; which is rather higher than the situation is on Earth. The only question is how much of this temperature comes from the black-body radiation of a sphere at the distance of Venus from the Sun and how much comes from CO2 greenhouse effect and from H2SO4 clouds.

I got a BOE estimate of 27 dec C from CO2 but someone above indicates it should be more when additional (weak) CO2 lines are taken into consideration. That could well be true. The point is that you can’t get away from actually doing the calculations.

The climate during the Miocene was similar to today’s climate, but warmer. Well-defined climatic belts stretched from Pole to Equator, however, there were palm trees and alligators in England and Northern Europe. Australia was less arid than it is now.

Based on these I have a hard time understanding how human produced CO2 (and I agree with Hans Erren that it is clear we have contributed to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) can have anything to do with global average temperatures.

Yes there are more complications which would have to be considered if this were a discussion in a scientific paper, but the only way a compressed gas would maintain the temperature gained while it was being compressed would be if it in some sort of perfect vacuum bottle. Otherwise any initial extra heat will be dissipated to the surroundings, which in the case of a planet means to space. Ultimately, of course, this would reduce the atmospheric temperature to the 3 deg K of space. But since Venus is near the star Sol, the venusian atmosphere can only drop to the temperature at which the insolation is balanced by the radiation to space; which is rather higher than the situation is on Earth. The only question is how much of this temperature comes from the black-body radiation of a sphere at the distance of Venus from the Sun and how much comes from CO2 greenhouse effect and from H2SO4 clouds.

If there were no incident heat/energy into the system, then yes, Steve Milesworthy would be correct. However, there is about as much incident heat/energy put into the system as there is here on earth (earth gets less due to distance, but Venus reflects more). Given that, the primary distinctions are 1) Venus is almost purely CO2 while earth is mostly O2 and N2 which means different P-T phase relationships and 2) Venus is 93x the pressure.

As I said, I only proffered a _simple_ reason why Venus would be hotter… ignoring pressure is disingenuous.

“Note that Venus is not 93 times hotter, only about 2x hotter (in Kelvins).”

I think this might be the key to the discusion. We think of it being so much hotter on venus, actually the numbers I find (don’t want to quote the source, would live to see someone post a good source) is that Venus is more than 2X in Kelvin. I have Venus at 730K and Earth at 288.

But incident radiation is also higher, close to twice exactly. With Venus at 2,643 W/M^2 and earth at 1379 W/M^2. People tend to think in terms of the arbitrary 0 that we use with F and C, but in this discusion it makes much more sense to go with Kelvin. When you compare 2X incident radiation and ~2.5X temp Kelvin they aren’t as far off.

Now Venus’ Albedo is rated at 0.8 and Earth at 0.3 but I can’t help but think that this does not take into account the high energy radiation let in by the abscence of a magnetic field. I cannot find any references to what effect the absence of a magnetic field would cause on temperature.

RE: #241 – furthermore, it is confusing to me, how we could focus on something as piddly as AGW, when, based on the geological record and trend, taken at face value, there is a looming catastrophe. What will the world be like, with even less CO2 (you know we’ll get there eventually, it is seemingly unstoppable) than even the Quaternary low point to date? Our choices appear to be, colonize other planets, or, gain control of this one. I’d split it into two, parallel efforts, since gaining control of this one is a highly non trivial excercise.

Venus: Short and sweet. Some major differences most of which would explain the heating. But there’s really no comparison. This might answer some questions tho, like the one about the magnetic field.

Closer to the sun.
No water. No ocean depths to hold heat, nor to lubricate the plates and reduce friction and cool the planet.
Clouds are made of Sulphur Dioxide that trap the heat.
Rotates slower. (No cooling for the ground every 12 hours like earth.)
No dynamo in the core, so no magnetic field: No particles to deflect solar winds and no pole reversal every 700K years
No oxygen.
Mostly CO2. And no water vapor. (which is why the CO2 holds the heat for Venus rather than the water vapor and oceans like on Earth. It has no where else to go.)
Much higher surface pressure ( 9.3M vs Earth’s 101K) (Which I believe would compresses whatever heat holding gases there are to hold more heat.
80 % of the surface is volcanic plains.
No animal or plant life.
No moon.
No equatorial bluge.
An Rotates the oppposite direction. (Perhaps reversed by an empact event 10 million years ago, Which would have probably sucked in whatever moon(s) it used to have as well.)
Asteroid 2002 VE68 is in a quasi-orbit around the planet.
Has less of an eliptical orbit.

So why is Venus hotter? Because it is closer to the sun, has no carbon cycle to regulate temperature, no water to remove the friction on the plates, the surface is mostly huges volcanoes, and there are no water clouds to let out the heat. Any gas that absorbs heat as the main gas would result in the same type of atmosphere.

As wiki sez about the greenhouse effect:

The greenhouse effect is the process in which the emission of infrared radiation by the atmosphere warms a planet’s surface. The name comes from an analogy with the warming of air inside a greenhouse compared to the air outside the greenhouse. The Earth’s average surface temperature is about 33°C warmer than it would be without the greenhouse effect.[1] The greenhouse effect was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1829 and first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In addition to the Earth, Mars and especially Venus have greenhouse effects.

So if the surface of Venus (or any planet) is warmed by the emission of IR by the atmosphere, it has a greenhouse effect. If it’s not, it doesn’t. All we have to do is read the definition. But it doesn’t matter in the case of Venus, it’s a different question.

The conditions on Venus are so fundamentally different; it’s not the same thing as our greenhouse effect, regardless. So at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It works differently; no matter what we call it, it’s not the same thing.

#247 Mark, a molten core comes from more than just plate tectonics. And I left off a bunch of historical stuff too; trying to keep it at 50,000 feet.

Specifically, Venus does have plate tectonics, but with the crust subducting quickly within a few million years but mostly a few hundred million years of stability. Earth’s oceans give us a fairly stable state of subduction and continental drift on the other hand.

Dynamos require conducting liquid, rotation and convection. Venus’ rotation gives the possibility (from simulation) that it could support a dynamo, and that the core is probably electrically conductive. However, the convection is missing. Earth’s convection is in its liquid outer layer of the core, with the bottom much hotter than the top. Since there’s no heat gradient on Venus, either: The core is at a constant temperature (no convection) or solidified or there is no solid inner core (and therefore no conducting liquid at all either).

The point is Venus has no magnetic field to speak of, regardless of why. Or in other words, the magnetosphere of Venus is too weak to protect it from cosmic radiation and that’s why the magnetic field has something to do with temperature. It’s all part of the system of the planet, and different from ours that’s the only “important” thing.

I notice your regular dissatisfaction with Cryosphere data ‘€” you may find this comparison interesting.

This is what Cryosphere showed as the historical Arctic sea-ice anomaly in December of last year, and what it shows now. The anomaly appears anomalous! Sourced via the “wayback machine” from here – discussed here:

While there will be additional pressure broadening of absorption lines, something that has not been mentioned is the shift to shorter emission wavelength with increased temperature. At the surface temperature of Venus, the emission spectrum has shifted to such a short wavelength (~4 micrometers at 750K, compared to ~10 micrometers at 300K) that CO2 is nearly transparent. As stated above, the real key to explaining the surface temperature of Venus is the cloud layer. It’s really easy to set up a single layer partial reflection model for radiation transfer in a spreadsheet. As the percent reflected back to the surface approaches 100%, the surface temperature increases without limit. Also, the Venusian clouds often have strong UV absorption features first observed by the Hubble telescope IIRC, so the albedo is probably lower in the UV than the visible.

This brings up the interesting (to me) question: Why does the Archer Modtran calculator show peak emission at 600 cm-1 or 16.7 microns for a surface temperature of 300K when it should be 1000 cm-1 or 10 microns? I don’t know why I missed that before.

#251 Ah, the anomalies are quite large, but the data is a little hard to come by, as we’ve had some station siting issues that are not quite worked out. It will be quite some time before I’ll be able to archive it….

#257 Yes, let me rephrase that so it’s not backwards. I shouldn’t have called it that, I was more thinking of the effects rather than the phrase. Venus has no (active) plate tectonics because they aren’t really plates to begin with, there is no fluid to speak of for the plates (such as they are) to move on: the planet probably doesn’t have an asthenosphere. The crust very infrequently subducts but mostly is mostly stationary. The planet’s surface does show features that on Earth are associated with tectonic activities: volcanoes, rifts, mountains, tesserae, folds and faults. But on Venus, these are caused by movements due to convection in the mantle.

RE: #257 – Not to nit pick but the way I learned it, wayyyyy back during the days of LaCoste knit piques, big hair, and MTV as the hot new thing – LOL – was that without radiactive decay in the mantle, there would be no mantle convection and hence, no plate tectonics.

Well my entire point is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s the crust buckling due to internal heat and a solid core, or plates sliding around on a temperature gradient and cooled by water and so on and so forth, is that the Earth and Venus have a different system, but have the same results by and large, so the term doesn’t matter…. I think in the past on Earth they used to think radioactive decay, but isn’t that what creates the heat? Or is that an old theory? I don’t know, that’s the details I wanted to stay away from…. :)

So let me try again: The crust on Venus is mainly stationary and heat and pressure forces geological changes. It does not have plates per se so can not let off heat. It is probably because of this probable lack of convection mechanism that it also has no dynamo; either the core is liquid at a “constant” temperature or has solidified. Therefore there is no magnetic field beyond a weak one, so the magnetosphere of Venus is too weak to protect it from cosmic radiation. And that’s why the magnetic field has something to do with temperature.

THE LONG RANGE MODELS SHOW VARIATIONS RUN TO RUN AND BETWEEN MODELS
WITH SOME SHOWING A FAIRLY STRONG CLOSED UPPER LEVEL LOW DEVELOPING
NEAR THE FORECAST AREA. CONFIDENCE IN MODEL SOLUTIONS IS LOW DUE TO
THIS VARIABILITY BUT EXPECT SOME TYPE OF TROUGH TO BE THE MAIN
FEATURE AT THE END OF THE WEEK INTO NEXT WEEK WITH CLOUDS…
COOLER…TEMPERATURES AND A CHANCE OF SOME SHOWERS.

The NWS / models have consistently underforecasted these systems thus far this Summer. 2007, Year Without A Summer (in the Pac NW).

(Some may argue, “but what about the handful of heat waves?” I would say to that, these heat waves are typical of what one would expect during the Fall, but with the higher sun angle right now, they are more intense than the fall version. Synoptically, it’s Fall in the Pac NW)

…that without radiactive decay in the mantle, there would be no mantle convection and hence, no plate tectonics.

That was Kelvin’s theory to explain why Earth hasn’t already solidified. It’s a bit unsatisfactory – without any way to measure the amount of radioactive decay going on down there, there is no way to determine if there is the right amount of radioactives to explain the observed state of the planet.

Global Mantle Warming
Haven’t you heard about the latest research about “Global Mantle Warming”? Imagine it, Anthropogenic Outhouse Warming (AOW). Too many humans digging holes in the Earth’s lithosphere and upsetting Nature’s subterranean balances and thereby causing supervolcanoes which melt, shake, submerge, and flood inhabited land surfaces far and wide in a planetary holocaust the like of which has not been experienced on Earth in millions and millions of years? Climate scientists joining with geological scientists in warning the world of these human caused planetary catastrophes? International conferences representing the scientific consensus that something must be done immediately to mitigate this threat to the survival and welfare of humanity resulting from the multitude of holes put into the protective surface of the Earth by the commercial oil and mining industries seeking to exploit the planet for their own financial and political greed. Does the report not demonstrate we are now past the point of denial? See:

Still haven’t figured out how the ocean can uptake CO2 and warm at the same time?

If you understood basic physics and the operation of a _dynamic_ system you’d understand one very important point: The flow of CO2 into the ocean, or any gas into any liquid, is not one way. There is a dynamically changing flow both ways, with a net direction that changes with changing ocean temperatures; increase the temperature of the body of water and the net flow will change proportionally (warmer means less uptake, cooler means more). If the ocean water warms, the flow will change, reducing the uptake. Certainly at the poles, where the ocean is much cooler, there will be more going in than at the equator, where the ocean is warmer. At no point does it suddenly switch from all in to all out.

So, it’s no longer your belief that the CO2 level can’t be increasing in the oceans because they are warming?

Uh, I never said that. CO2 levels in the ocean probably would increase, particularly at the surface. Carbon sequestered at the bottom of the ocean has to come to the surface before it is released, right? Below the thermocline the ocean is near freezing, which constitutes the majority of the water, and is also near the maximum solubility level, right? The oceans circulate, right?

Engineering-wise that is referred to as 30 psig (psig=pounds per square inch gauge) where the ‘pressure’ measured is the difference between ‘inside’ the tire and outside the tire without respect to atmospheric pressure.

Your car tires would measure 45 psia.

and in the tyres of my bike is 50psi,

50 psig => 65 psia

but they’re all at the same temperature.

The densities DO differ though, and this affects nearly every other property.

Don’t waste your time… Some people like to put words in ones mouth when have no valid arguments. Beneath 250 m of depth the temperature decreases from 22.5 °C to 2.7 °C at a depth of 4500 m. The thermocline consists of water layers from where the temperature decreases sensibly with depth.

The organisms that use carbon dioxide to synthesize compounds to make their internal or external skeletons and other structures, so for support as for defense, are another oceanic carbon dioxide “sink”. Not always one should think about an inorganic dissolving of the compound in the marine water. When those organisms die, their structures get the ThD equilibrium and the CO2 is dissolved again in the water. You can perform the experiment described at Ocean Planet. Yeah, I know it is thought for High School students, but it is real… ;)

Actually, what folks like Boris do is constantly present ill-posed arguments, bifurcations, in which only one or another answer is possible. In fact, this is rarely true in dynamic systems such as the climate as the sheer number of inputs and outputs is staggering. The answer is typically “none of the above.” You list yet another source for CO2 in the ocean.

Of course, where the CO2 in the ocean came from has nothing to do with the original argument. Boris asked for a reference when I claimed CO2 has a lower solubility in warmer water. Pretty simple and even discussed on the wiki page regarding solubility… high school or even grade school chemistry (heaven forbid he would actually put a soda can out in the sun to test the theory). It escalated.

Sometimes you get tired of ill-informed posts that waste bandwidth that those with real points and real issues could otherwise be filling. Sometimes you get tired of it and speak out.

The densities DO differ though, and this affects nearly every other property.

Yet another one of those “simple” concepts that slips right over the illuminati. Gavin Schmidt and feedback reversing cause-effect relationships, Michael Mann and linear processing of non-linear systems with correlated inputs. Does it ever end?

A one-dimensional climate model is used to study the response of an Earth-like atmosphere to large increases in solar flux. For fully saturated, cloud-free conditions, the critical solar flux at which a runaway greenhouse occurs, that is, the oceans evaporate entirely, is found to be 1.4 times the present flux at Earth’s orbit (S0). This value is close to the flux expected at Venus’ orbit early in solar system history. It is nearly independent of the amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere, but is sensitive to the H2O absorption coefficient in the 8- to 12-Î¼m window region. Clouds should tend to depress the surface temperature on a warm, moist planet; thus, Venus may originally have had oceans if its initial water endowment was close to that of Earth. It lost them early in its history, however, because of rapid photodissociation of water vapor followed by escape of hydrogen to space. The critical solar flux above which water is rapidly lost could be as low as 1.1S0. The surface temperature of a runaway greenhouse atmosphere containing a full ocean’s worth of water would have been in excess of 1500°K’€”above the solidus for silicate rocks. The presence of such a steam atmosphere during accretion may have significantly influenced the early thermal evolution of both Earth and Venus.

# _Jim
I’m sure you are correct. The density differs along with other properties, but the temperature is the same (assuming thermal equilibrium has been reached).

#242 Mark T.
I’m afraid Dave is correct. Pressure is a red herring and whether there is incident radiation is not important. Energy in must equal energy out in equilibrium. Ignoring reflected energy, pretty much all energy out from a planet is through radiation. The only way of changing the amount of radiation is to change the temperature of the radiating layer.

If pressure is an issue, it is only with regard to changing the height of the radiating layer. This, however, is only relevant if the atmosphere is radiatively active (contains greenhouse gases).

If you are correct, and the solar energy absorbed by Venus is about the same as is absorbed by earth (because TSI is higher but so is albedo), then looking from space, the “temperature” of Venus (ie. the temperature of its upper atmosphere) should be similar to the “temperature” of earth (about 255 Kelvin).

I attempted to post this nicely over on RC but they will not post it, however they seem to fully support me being flamed for not support the dogma. I figure I will post it here so may be someone would address the issues I have.

I use to think that this site[RealClimate] had real climate scientists that wanted to address the hard questions of climatology and instead I find that it is a site where real discussion of the serious issues are stymied, basically just a site where fan boy’s ok but anyone that questions the dogma are attacked and posts that attack the one asking the questions are freely posted not those that present the studies that call CO2 based global warming into question. I really do not expect this to be posted here because this site’s position is that it is better to discredit the questioner than to address the questions. Basically, this is an advocacy site, not a true science site.

I asked three questions that are tied to the very underpinning of the CO2 theory.

1. If the proxies show that warming peaked early in the 20th century and is lower at the end of the century, what does this do to the CO2 argument? The first problem I see this causing is that the proxies do not match the instrumented readings. This is a major problem for the theory because it means either we do not know how to measure the global temperature with direct measurements or the proxies are not representing the actual temperature. If either is true then there is no way to know if the warming now is exceptional or not.

If you look at the right edge of the chart, it clearly shows that the proxies show lower temperatures than the instrumented readings and that the highest proxy measured temperatures happened before the end of the century. None of the studies show the proxy readings matching the instrumented readings at the end of the century.

2. It has been stated that sea level change is accelerating however there are some issues with what is causing sea level change and whether there is any acceleration or not. There are two means of measuring sea level change: tide gauges and satellite measurements. Both means have problems. Tide gauges have problems:

tide gauges have two drawbacks:
1. their geographical distribution provides very poor sampling of the ocean basins, especially when studying the climatic signal over the past century, and
2. they measure sea level relative to the land, hence recording vertical crustal motions that may be of the same order of magnitude as the sea level variation.

Satellites have issues with accuracy, namely that the orbit accuracy does not exceed 2cm and therefore the most accurate reading possible is +/- 2cm. This can be seen in:
Jason-1 precision orbit verification, J.C. Ries, B.D. Tapley, R.J. Eanes, H.J. Rim which can be found at: http://topex-www.jpl.nasa.gov/science/invest-ries.html

The current models for the forces acting on the T/P spacecraft, combined with high accuracy ground-based tracking, support an orbit accuracy approaching 2 cm radial RMS (root-mean-squared), an unprecedented level of orbit accuracy for an altimeter satellite.

When combining measurements with different degrees of accuracy and precision, the accuracy of the final answer can be no greater than the least accurate measurement. This principle can be translated into a simple rule for addition and subtraction: When measurements are added or subtracted, the answer can contain no more decimal places than the least accurate measurement. When the best reading you can get is +/- 20mm, then no amount of readings will allow the precision to be better than 2cm. This seems to be ignored by climatologist. If your accuracy can only be measured down to the cm, then there is no way to get an answer that is at the mm level.

In effect, the observed value is more than twice as large as the revised estimate of the total climate contributions, although there is complete overlap between their respective uncertainties. It thus appears that either the climate-related processes causing sea level rise have been underestimated or the rate of sea level rise observed with tide gauges is in error. Munk [2002] refers to this as The Enigma.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes about 6 cm/century to melting and other eustatic processes, leaving a residual of 12 cm of 20th century rise to be accounted for. The Levitus compilation has virtually foreclosed the attribution of the residual rise to ocean warming (notwithstanding our ignorance of the abyssal and Southern Oceans): the historic rise started too early, has too linear a trend, and is too large. Melting of polar ice sheets at the upper limit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates could close the gap, but severe limits are imposed by the observed perturbations in Earth rotation. Among possible resolutions of the enigma are: a substantial reduction from traditional estimates (including ours) of 1.5-2 mm/y global sea level rise; a substantial increase in the estimates of 20th century ocean heat storage; and a substantial change in the interpretation of the astronomic record.

Further we know that the sea level rise is not uniform but rather regional from Cazenave(2003).

While in tide gauge-derived sea level studies most investigators assumed uniform sea level change, now we have, for the first time, unambiguous evidence of regional variability of sea level change, some regions exhibiting sea level trends about 10 times the global mean. It is in the western Pacific and eastern Indian Oceans that sea level rise presents the highest magnitude. It is also worth noting that the whole Atlantic Ocean shows sea level rise during the past decade. In contrast, Figure 7 shows that sea level has been dropping in some regions (eastern Pacific and western Indian Oceans), even though in terms of global mean, sea level has been rising.

Basically what this indicates is that we do not understand sea level change, we are not sure of what the sources of it are and to say that it is increasing now more than in the past cannot be proven.

These two issues must be addressed by those that support the CO2 theory of AGW or the theory is not valid. The mere fact that when something that does not support the theory, such as mid 20th century cooling is blamed on aerosols when no studies show any change in aerosols, or that some unknown amount of aerosol is off setting supposed CO2 warming in the Arctic when the UC Irvine study shows that 35 ‘€” 96 percent of the warming and melting is due to dirty snow’ then I will remain a skeptic and this is being coming dogma and not science.

You’re wrong on this, as you are on some other GW issues.
99
Mark T. says:
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:22 am

Last reply to you, Boris…

First, solubility of gas in water decreases with increasing temperature, in layman’s terms, that means warm water is capable of holding less of any gas. Look it up. Even your climatology friends know, and acknowldege this fact. In fact, this is what they think is the reason for the 800 year lag, because it takes that long for warming oceans to release excess CO2.

[…]

101
Boris says:
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:52 am

“First, solubility of gas in water decreases with increasing temperature, in layman’s terms, that means warm water is capable of holding less of any gas. Look it up.”

Is this a joke? I’ll leave it to you to figure out the incorrect assumption you make about the oceans.

You know, it would be nice if you had even ONE source to back up your claims, but the CO2 content in the ocean is rising. I gave you one study, but there are about 20 out there showing the same thing. There’s no point in arguing with someone who denies even the most basic evidence.

Or are Sabine and et al guilty of scientific fraud? I’m sure you have some theory or other on that one.

You sure seem to be arguing that CO2 can’t be increasing in the oceans because they are warming.

Note that I am asking for a source that shows CO2 decreasing in the oceans. The whole argument was about whether the modern CO2 increase is 100% due to mankind, which, of course, it is.

Here’s where your concept of linear system theory fails the test. This is a massively MIMO system, with linear (and non-linear) feedbacks and effects. The last statement is incredibly impossible to state, yet another bifurcation on your part. I.e. in your mind, since they can measure the increase in the atmosphere to be some level, and they know how much we’ve put it, it must ALL be due to mankind. Not true. Again, study some system theory with an emphasis on controls and you’ll understand why. Another simple concept that you don’t get for whatever reason. Granted, I’ll take it on faith that you don’t have the requisite background, yet here you sit and harp arguing from a position of ignorance.

Next, when water warms, its solubility decreases. That’s simple chemistry. However, near the surface, the concentration MUST increase, which I have said repeatedly. Why so? Because the surface is where the transfer is happening. While CO2 is being dredged up from the depths of the ocean, plus increased uptake in the colder regions it will necessarily increase in the surface water itself.

I’m afraid Dave is correct. Pressure is a red herring and whether there is incident radiation is not important. Energy in must equal energy out in equilibrium. Ignoring reflected energy, pretty much all energy out from a planet is through radiation. The only way of changing the amount of radiation is to change the temperature of the radiating layer.

And I agreed, in a simple scenario. But this isn’t a simple scenario as you of so many bifurcations seem want to put in place. Pressure makes a difference.

#269 D. Patterson, LOL! Very nice play on words! Seriously though, I wonder how you explain away with CO2….

#270 Mark T. That’s what I said in #268! :) Boris should stop bifurcatin’ ’round. :D

#282, others.
I find it so interesting how many people insist on appearing wrong, so you can write an explantion they ignore (or change the subject on or misdirect) on one single bit of fluffery. Gas goes in. And it comes out too! And there’s some stuck at different temperature gradients!! Of course we all understand that. Doesn’t matter.

So let’s talk just about the ocean, a single data point in Climate Change. That the “Ocean’s Temperature” is some value, yes it sure is. But it’s an unknown and unknowable value. We can’t measure it because its multi-dimensional properties have an infinite number of data points; ones that constantly change, too! The other factors besides temp are likewise; amount of organisms, quantity and types of gasses and solids in solution, volume… We can’t measure any one of them in the first place. Even if we could, combining them is near impossible anyway! So… We guess, by sampling some aspect. So if you have 5 people who don’t have any idea what an elephant is close their eyes ears nose and throat and use their hands to guess what that elephant is by touching it once, for an instant, with their pinky, each of them in a different area of the animal, what do they tell you it is, how much it weighs, what it eats, where it lives, how tall it is, how big its feet are, how long its trunk is…. And their answer sure ain’t “The temperature of the ocean.”

The same applies for atmosphere, land, wind, sun, cosmic, …. We can never know the exact value of even a single aspect of one aspect like ocean temperature, how do you model them all together?

And no Mark, it never ends.

#290 Since there’s no water and thus no humidity, I imagine the apparent temperature would be the same as whatever you wanted to measure. The surface mean of Venus is about 735K (850F). Atmosphere is 250K(-10F) (The Apparent visual magnitude is -4.4 although that has nothing to do with it, I think it’s interesting.)

Oh, and anyway, the only important thing is really the total energy level of the Earth and its change over time; likewise unknowable.

#293
There are a number of gasses (nitrogen and oxygen come to mind, IIRC) that don’t absorb IR (or don’t absorb much of it per unit, as in water vapor). Or was that question rhetorical? :)

#295
You beat me to it in between posts!!!

But I’ll put it here again

Boris: That the “Ocean’s Temperature” is some value, yes it sure is. But it’s an unknown and unknowable value. We can’t measure it because its multi-dimensional properties have an infinite number of data points; ones that constantly change. Besides just temperatures, this is also true in amount of organisms, quantity and types of gasses and solids in solution (of which there are many more than CO2), volume… We can’t measure any one of them in the first place. So your questions are meaningless because they have no answers.

I’d guess this is all FUD to take attention away from the AMS’ latest issue with the Pielke Sr et al paper…..

I’m looking for published quotes from prominent sceptics that the climate has been cooling since 1998 that I can cite in a manuscript I’m finishing off. I have quotes from Carter (2007) and Ball (2007). Does anybody have any other suggestions?

What nonsense. You guys keep forgetting we’re dealing with the “anomaly” here. Is there an anomaly in ocean temps? Which way is it going?

Mark,

Is it your contention that the increase in CO2 is not from FF? Do you have an answer for the C12/C13 ratios in atmospheric and oceanic carbon that directly contradict your theory? Do you have an answer for where all the CO2 from FF is going? If it all ended up in the atmosphere we should be at about 500 ppm now.

#301 Hmmmm. I was under the impression they were measuring anomalies of some depth of water on the surface in 2 x 2 degree grids as an average, not “the ocean”. :)

Actually, let me clarify that. We can’t measure (know) “the ocean’s temperature” because there’s no single temperature (and no single ocean or single sea, lol. Sea surface temperatures. Whatever. “liquid water on the surface of the Earth in oceans, seas and other large bodies that get measured”)

Samples that result in calulations that result in averages that are then modeled to account for what we think the volume and other properties are is not “knowing” the SST. It’s the change in some ethereal number that’s derived from incomplete calculated averaged modeled data.

#302 I wasn’t talking about anomalies, and neither were you. You asked if “the oceans” were getting warmer, not if the measured anomalies were getting warmer. You started by talking about the ocean uptaking CO2 and getting warmer in #267. Then you switched to asking Mark if he believed CO2 couldn’t be increasing in the oceans because they are warming in #276. In #294 you likewise asked about the oceans and CO2. Don’t get upset at me if you’re not being clear what you’re talking about, the ocean temp and CO2, or anomalies.

But if you wanted the anomalies, what are samples of the surface that result in calculations that result in averages that are then modeled to account for what we think the volume and other properties, the change in some ethereal number that’s derived from incomplete calculated averaged modeled data telling us? I don’t know, what does the ERSST data tell us it’s doing?

Do you have an answer for the C12/C13 ratios in atmospheric and oceanic carbon that directly contradict your theory?

What theory?

Do you have an answer for where all the CO2 from FF is going? If it all ended up in the atmosphere we should be at about 500 ppm now.

You’ve got a massively MIMO system with an unknown ability to sink just about any material, and somehow simple surface measurements tell you _everything_ about the system?

Really, man, try to learn and understand how a feedback system behaves. It’s not a black/white “it’s gotta be this way or it’s gotta be that way, choose or die!” situation.

It’s interesting how you keep switching around, hoping to catch basic science in some sort of “conundrum” that cannot be explained, and suddenly out you spring with a “GOTCHA!” Sorry, but you have neither the understanding, nor the cleverness to pull off something as such.

FINER POINTS FROM THE REAL NATURE: I’ve had a weird experience that I hope someone here be able to explain… I checked the temperature from a given square meter of grass and it was 134.78 °F. The grass was about 30 cm high and I the laser pointed to the base of the steams. Then I went to the next square and the temperature was 112.10 °F. The situation is that I cannot make any median because at the next square the temperature was 89.78 °F. I walked along some 164.04 ft and checked the temperature of the grass and it was 101.66 °F. It was a cloudless day and the temperature of the uncovered ground (sand) was 137.12 °F. The temperature of air under the sunbeams was 92.30 °F. The intensity of the SR was 455.51 W/m^2 and the luminosity was 25.5 eV. The RH of each grassy area was 57%; and it didn’t change from one square to another. The wind speed was 9.32 mph and it changed some times down barely to 8.82 mph. What could be the cause of those sharp differences? Would getting a median be applicable? Could it be the CO2? (Hah).

My question is on tree rings: I would like to know if there are what may be called “error bounds” on temperatures derived from tree rings, and if so, how they are calculated. I’ve found numerous explanations of determining temp from rings, but nothing that said “So the temp for 1703 is known to be 19.6 C to 19.95 C and here is why”. Also, do tree ring temp estimates become less certain with older series, or are they considered to be relatively consistant as to the error bounds?

#291 1. There are several problems with the assumptions versus divergence of proxies and AGW. One possibility that has been alluded to in veiwing the adjustments used for temperature to develop the grids that are used for the anonolies whose trend is used to claim global warming, is that the adjustments were wrong as in UHI or microsite contamination which could cause this problem. Assume this is true, then the divergence problem (recent times only) could disappear, the proxies were good, because the data was bad. I think this would have political worldwide repurcussions due to the world is ending by CO2 scare that is on-going with temperatures always rsing and the new correlation would be the temperatures reached their peak in the 1990’s while CO2 is yet rising (direct falsification). Another possibility is not only is the data bad, but once corrected, the modern global warming would be shown to be solar in nature not anthropogenic. Once again political fallout. I believe that RC has as big a stake (on the individual basis) to be AGW, as EXXON does that it is NOT anthropogenic. Thus the censorship.

2. IPCC is by consensus. The rules allow unpublished, unsupportable theories to be accorded the same value as proven science. Majority rules (See Rule 10 under Rules and Procedures of IPCC). Thus it should be unsuprising that such a large range that better describes what they don’t know rather than what is known to be included. If you wonder how IPCC could do this, just read the rules and understand that the lead author “can stack the deck” and throw out complaints from disagreeing scientists by simply stating that the consensus was reached.

3

These two issues must be addressed by those that support the CO2 theory of AGW or the theory is not valid.

I believe this is what climateaudit is about. Apparently the claim is that if it is peer-reveiwed and consensus has been achieved, then real science does not matter, nor does it count.

The point exactly; this is not “simple siso” it is “massive mimo”. You can’t just talk about what the mean anomany SST is, nor how much CO2 is estimated to be absorbed and released in the SST area without realizing that is just .1% of that question in the first place, and we guess at the other 99.9% And that’s just one of the mimos.

#312 Cores from trees are like cores from ice. They tell you something, but I have no idea what that something is (maybe along the lines of my paragraph above).

being an EE, I understand what Mark T is saying, and he is exactly right. But I don’t think you’re understanding his terminology or conceptual framework, so I’ll try to answer these questions in a different way, more layman like. I take FF to refer to Hydrocarbons.

>> Still haven’t figured out how the ocean can uptake CO2 and warm at the same time?

I’m presuming by this that someone postulated that the measured increase in C02 at Mauna Loa could be caused by oceans increasing in temperature. This is very likely. The answer is that the ocean is not a singular point at a certain temperature. The ocean has currents. Cold water will absorb C02, and sink to the ocean floor. At some other point in the oceans, C02 water will rise and at the equator, it will warm even more, and by Henry’s law, expel C02.

>> Note that I am asking for a source that shows CO2 decreasing in the oceans.

If only the vast ocean area upwind from Mauna Loa were warming, it would cause the measurement increase. Measurement of ocean C02 show that the levels are generally low, which is expected, since it’s a cycle. It’s like saying, rain generally strikes the ground at a lower altitude from whence it came. Measuring C02 on top of a volcanoe, a known C02 source, is quite questionable. An alternate explanation is that this particular volcanoe is increasing it’s C02 output.
>> The whole argument was about whether the modern CO2 increase is 100% due to mankind, which, of course, it is.

You can’t know that, since like Sam said, the huge C02 fluxes are unknown and unmeasureable. You should realize that the carbon cycle is, like the water cycle, a cycle! It goes around and around. Just like the atmosphere CANNOT accumulate water, it cannot accumulate C02. Henry’s law forbids it. All the C02 in the atmosphere is on it’s way into the ocean. C02 atmospheric lifetime is about 5 years, not the 100+ postulated by the AGW idea, which violates a known scientific law.

>> Is it your contention that the increase in CO2 is not from FF?

Yes, it certainly is my contention. It’s more likely that human C02 output is a mere .2 % of the total C02 flux. Human C02 output merely makes it look like there is a bit more animal life. Just as the average human’s C02 output is negligible in his immediate environment, it is even more negligible for the earth as a whole.

>> Do you have an answer for the C12/C13 ratios in atmospheric and oceanic carbon that directly contradict your theory?

Do you mean C-14? The evidence is that at MOST, only 4% of the C02 in the atmosphere is from burning Hydrocarbons. Even this is questionable, since the premise of this conclusion is that burning petroleum products is the ONLY source of non C-14 C02, which it isn’t. There is a huge inorganic carbon cycle. The bottom line is that all evidence points to the conclusion that humans are only responsible for an extremely small fraction of the C02 flux.

>> Do you have an answer for where all the CO2 from FF is going?

Like all C02 in the atmosphere, it’s either being absorbed by plant life or being absorbed by the oceans.

>> If it all ended up in the atmosphere we should be at about 500 ppm now.

We really don’t know the global C02 level. The global amount could be unknowable. All we can do is measure at specific points. For example, measuresments taken in luxembourg between 2003 and 2005, with over 58600 data points, range from 330 to over 550 ppm. Contrary to AGW, there is no C02 dome over cities. During the depression, human C02 went down by at least 30%, yet accurate C02 measurements don’t show any human effect. C02 levels went up during that time, reaching a peak of 420 in 1940.

I thought if Boris even answered or knew ahead of time what the answer was, he’d change the subject or something, and that he didn’t know anyway, so I plotted it in the meantime, and it was as I expected, 0. The problem with that first link, you have to do each year separate or download the dataset seemingly one year at a time and then Excell it in some odd painful process.

However, I did go ahead and look at the Min/Max for the SST readings for the average of the entire period 1854-2006, 1854, 2006 and the period 1961-1990. On a yearly basis from the monthly values. These are the reported temperatures. So if you’d like to know what the temperature of the sea surfaces “is” here you go.

In each case, the min was -1.8 The max:

1961-1990 29.4405
1854-2006 29.4356

2006 29.8842
1854 29.5606

So rounding the mean to two decimals gives us a base period mean of 1961-1990 of 13.82 or a base period of 1854-2006 of 13.82, same mean. No change.

The anomaly of 1854 is +.06 and the anomaly of 2006 is +.22 So there’s a .16 difference. You can trend that if you want to, I’m not going to bother.

On the min, there is no difference at all.
On the max, if we take the 29.44 number of 61-90 (versus 29.43 for 1854-2006), we get +.12 on 1854 and +.44 in 2006 for a variation of .32

So absolutes, “the oceans” have warmed, in 150 years (excluding the fact that in that time we changed measurement methods and they are now more accurate) 0 on the min, .32 on the max and .16 on the mean. (Which is interesting, it’s also about at the median)

#298 Steve Mosher and others interested in Steve
Mc Intyreⳳ appearance on CHQR AM 770 Tuesday
July 31 2007 20.30 How to hear and/or get it:
You go to the CHQR website, in the left column
there is “audio vault” click it, then if youⳲe
not a member you have to fill in a form but
I still sit in Solna Sweden so I had to make
up a Toronto number 416 area code and put 2 extra digits to my old 1940ⳳ 6-digit number
(but handles 8 MB/S fine ADSL)(Steve McIntyre
I really hope that it doesn⳴ happen to be
yours…LOL!)(I first thought CHQR was a Toronto station (my DX-ing NAm station knowledge is getting a little rusty..)
After filling in procedures you get an e-mail
and confirm it which is tricky for me since
after last Java update Internet Explorer crashed so
now itⳳ the “Cunning little vixen”(Also opera
by Leos Janà¡cek…)
The audio vault: CHQR is a Calgary station
so hour to choose 20.00 You must have Windows Media player!
If you want to save it copy location and use
Net Transport or maybe Flash-get for downloading the stream. If that is
to complicated use Jet Audio and do it in real
time…For your own personal use only of
course!! Peace of cake as Mr Chamberlain
would have said returning from Münich…

Re: 323 and 324
Boris,
Re: 323, pls provide verifiable references for your contention re: CO2 concentrations in the oceans, atmosphere and biosphere.
Re: 324, RC is a reference on “climate science” as much as the Vatican is a reference on birth control.

This is getting silly. You lecture people and it’s clear you have never bothered to crack the lit on this subject. Start with RC and go from there.

I couldn’t care any less about what RC says than what you say. You both clearly have an agenda, and you both have demonstrated a very serious misunderstanding of basic science.

First of all, my statement was ridiculously sarcastic if you haven’t been able to figure that out. Second, I still dare you to educate yourself on the behavior of massively MIMO systems with linear and non-linear feedbacks. Until you do, I doubt you’ll ever even be able to understand what I’m talking about.

My question is on tree rings: I would like to know if there are what may be called “error bounds” on temperatures derived from tree rings, and if so, how they are calculated. I’ve found numerous explanations of determining temp from rings, but nothing that said “So the temp for 1703 is known to be 19.6 C to 19.95 C and here is why”. Also, do tree ring temp estimates become less certain with older series, or are they considered to be relatively consistant as to the error bounds?

These results indicate that proxy data is not accurate enough to make conclusions about unprecedentedness of 20th century. And maybe here’s an explanation why there’s no interaction between the Team and mainstream statisticians. But this is all non-peer reviewed, so let’s not jump to conclusions too early.

quote: re: comment #3:
1. How much is naturally occurring CO2 + 2. How much is anthropogenic in nature

natural CO2 is about 280 ppmv; today’s CO2 is about 380 ppmv, so about 30% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is due to humans endquote

I would like this to be proved and not hand-waved. The statement that the level has gone up from recent historical levels and therefore we’ve caused it is naive in the extreme — levels have varied before without human intervention.

quote: also, we know that the increase in CO2 over the last hundred years or so is due to fossil fuels because it is depleted in both C13 and C14. endquote

This is the best of the smoking guns. However, it was proposed before the paper showing the ability of non-obligate C3 metabolism phytoplankton to switch to C4 metabolic pathways in conditions of stress (low CO2, low chromium and zinc levels, I don’t know about iron). The C3 pathway distinguishes much more between heavy and light isotopes than C4 — has allowance been made for the fact that C4 plants may be altering the overall isotopic biological pump? Do the calculations which assert the 12C/13C change acknowledge this possibility? C14 is strongly selected against in C3 plants, not so much in C4. The same question applies. Isotopic biological pull-down is not at a set ratio.

SSTs have been rising since the LIA. Has there been a tiny increase of deep water temperatures which has altered the rate of clathrate consumption by deep ocean methanophage bacteria? If deep-sea methane is being consumed, the CO2 signature will be the same as that caused by burning fossil fuels.

quote: 3. How much is absorbed by various sinks
we emit about 8 billion tons of C each year into the atmosphere, and the amount of C in the atmosphere goes up by about 4 billion tons … which says that sinks absorb the other half. endquote

Or other sources which we have not allowed for are increased enormously — the clathrate consumption one for example. So the sinks may be able to absorb 50 GT extra a year but they’re being fed 54. But look at the atmospheric vs anthropogenic CO2 graphs during the 1940s — burning of fossil fuels increases while atmospheric CO2 goes down, a curious fact which suggests that we don’t really know what is going on. Why does the CO2 dietician suddenly allow the planet to devour the whole plateful while before and after there is an edict that only half is allowed?

The human contribution to the CO2 turnover is minute. To assume that we cause the rise in atmospheric CO2 is like a little boy feeling guilty when a dam bursts after he has widdled in a lake.

quote: 4. What are the limits of those sinks
good question endquote

See the point above about the 1940s. Why this mysterious half? A few decades ago the sinks could consume 2 Gt. Now 4. Tomorrow, 5. Why not 5 now? Why not 7 now?

quote: 5. How long before such a doubling of CO2 occurs.
probably around the middle of this century endquote

I’m not sure this question is meaningful. Put simply, we don’t really know what is going on. If we have clathrate trouble then a big bubble could double it in a year. If the problem is sea pollution then a change to non-oily propulsion might increase ocean fertility to such an extent that levels drop alarmingly. We don’t know.

A recent news item in Nature about aerosols over asia suggests, under certain circumstances, they can cause warming. Given that aerosols have been used in models as a negative feedback, i.e. are cooling – does this new evidence not imply a reduced climate sensitivity to CO2.

Uh, does that count as a DUH? Emphasis in the above quote as well as caps on the DUH, mine…

Mark

If you don’t care what RC says then read the literature.

I never said ocean warmth doesn’t affect solubility, just that that fact is irrelevant to whether the CO2 level is increasing in the ocean or not. It’s fine if you want to back away from your claim that CO2 is not increasing–and honestlky I don’t know if that’s your claim or not. You haven’t been very clear. Let me make two statements which are true and verified by multiple studies. If you disagree, then say so.

1. CO2 is increasing in the oceans, even though they are warming. (I’m talking net increases here–of course there is exchanging going on.)
2. The modern increase in atmospheric CO2 is dvirtually entirely due to the burning of FF.

But the increase adds up year after year. So if that boy had been widdling for 150 years non-stop…

I never commented on magnitude and there is gain in the system (positive or negative) so the impact is not known.

If you don’t care what RC says then read the literature.

I have, and I did… where do you think the quote came from.

1. CO2 is increasing in the oceans, even though they are warming. (I’m talking net increases here’€”of course there is exchanging going on.)

It is increasing at the surface, which has to happen in order for the ocean to release more, i.e. it has to come from somewhere. Duh #2.

2. The modern increase in atmospheric CO2 is dvirtually entirely due to the burning of FF.

Wait a minute, you said all, before?? The fact of the matter is that there are too many assumptions in the system to draw any clear conclusions. Majority? Probably. All, not possible (my only contention all along). “Virtually entirely,” maybe, maybe not.

But the increase adds up year after year. So if that boy had been widdling for 150 years non-stop…

Btw, this is where the original argument began. The oceans warmed first, then the temperature rose, 800 years later, in historic records. Your contention was that warming the ocean would not cause a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere, which is patently wrong.

C02 measurements in various ocean waters show levels way below equilibrium. Therefore, oceans generally sink C02. The levels are low enough, and the size of the ocean reservoir so massive, that it will always be a net sink. However, hot equatorial waters outgas C02. The fact that folks at Mauna Loa only take measurements when the wind is blowing in from the sea supports the contention that Mauna Loa measurements are most likely corrupted by 1) equatorial outgassing, 2) weather (C02 plumes from equator are weather dependent and 3) discarding data which doesn’t fit the AGW idea.

>> 2. The modern increase in atmospheric CO2 is dvirtually entirely due to the burning of FF.

I completely disagree. The O2 and CO2 cycles are tied together through photosynthesis, respiration and combustion. The variation in oxygen content of the atmosphere provides strong evidence for the role of fossil fuel burning in the increase of atmospheric CO2. It also allows us to partition the importance of the different sinks for CO2 viz the ocean versus terrestrial uptake.

The O2 and CO2 cycles are tied together through photosynthesis, respiration and combustion.

Sure, they are linked, but that doesn’t mean they are 100%.

The variation in oxygen content of the atmosphere provides strong evidence for the role of fossil fuel burning in the increase of atmospheric CO2.

It provides strong evidence for the impact of fossil fuel burning on O2 content in the atmosphere.

You indicate there are many possible reasons…such as?

Gee, I don’t know… deforestation, natural cycles, ocean yet again… The system’s pretty complex and making such definitive statements as “decreasing O2 means all the CO2 is due to man’s burning of fossil fuels” is a stretch.

Re:339 and 340
340: exactly.
The above is akin to the proverbial cat around a bowl of hot milk [or porridge as the Swedes would have it]. AGW says: Increased CO2 causes increased temperatures. How about some repeatable, verifiable experiment that conclusively demonstrates this. Without that, fact is best available empirical data is increasingly falsifying the hypothesis and the discussion becomes purely academic.

#343 I’m not sure that a discussion about the reason for an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere has anything relevant to say about AGW. Did I say anything about increasing CO2 being the cause of increased temperatures?

#342 There are very few processes, none that I can identify at present that can cause a simultaneous rise in CO2 and decrease in oxygen other than respiration and combustion. Whilst our inventories of fossil fuel burning, cement production and deforestation are not perfect, they are consistent with the level of rise in CO2. The drop in oxygen content is also consisitent with this inventory.

>> The variation in oxygen content of the atmosphere provides strong evidence for the role of fossil fuel burning in the increase of

atmospheric CO2.

It seems like quite a stretch to imagine that puny man is using enough oxygen to actually effect atmospheric levels. Of course, Oxygen is also subject to Henry’s law, which is how fish can breathe oxygen. Like C02, it would sink and source to and from oceans based on localised water temperatures.

Second quote proves the first. There are dozens of threads here concerning surfacestations.org. Anthony was in fact fill-in host recently while Steve was on vacation. (And appears to still have refrigerator rights.)

Many topics on this blog are focused on Anthony’s work. Several are on the side panel as current hot-topics of discussion.

You may well be right about plant life. An increased greening of the planet as a result of increased CO2 could well lead to a restoration of oxyegn levels but we don’t see that yet.

Really, this comes down to a bit more control theory. Lots of sources, known and unknown, non-linear effects, linear effects, feedbacks, etc. Simply doing a measurement at some point in such a chaotic (like) system doesn’t tell a whole lot about what’s going on. Sure you can attempt to draw conclusions, but it’s not hard to draw other conclusions as well, both are equally valid (or invalid) in the absence of a method to test them.

Well Gunnar, it may seem a stretch but it can be measured. For example, using estimates of the fossil fuel inventory between 1990 and 1997 we would calculate that CO2 should rise by about 20ppm and oxygen decrease by a similar amount 20ppm. Of course it’s easy to measure the rise in CO2, being several percent of the total CO2 concentration. For oxygen the decrease is 20ppm in 210,000 ppm. An extraordinarily difficult measurement to make, but one that can be done.

The actual measurements are a rise of CO2 of about 9ppm and a drop of oxygen of about 22ppm.

This observation can be explained by an oceanic sink of 1.9+/-0.8 Pg C/yr and a biospheric sink of ca. 2 +/-1.5Pg C/yr.

A misstatement on my part, though not entirely untrue, good catch, however. Warmer waters will hold less than they otherwise would have been able to hold. As noted by Gunnar, the oceans aren’t at the point of saturation. The point being that increasing ocean temperatures will result in either less uptake, or increased release (the two are indistinguishable in a feedback system).

No, you didn’t. You posted some nonsense about CO2 having an atmospheric life of 5 years. You did not answer or understand the isotope evidence. You claimed things were just too complex. You conflated modern CO2 measuring capabilities with older ones known to be in error. You claimed that all carbon from FF went into the atmosphere, then was pushed in to the ocean and biosphere very quickly only to be replaced with some unknown natural CO2 source. In short, you didn’t do very well at all.

Gunnar, I’ve already said that the decrease in oxygen is small and in the ppm range, not percent range. The measurements are out there. We’ve even made the measurements in my own lab. Taking your figures a drop in oxygen levels from about 210,000 to 200,000 ppm in 24,000 years is equivalent to a drop of about 0.5ppm per annum. This is within range of what we actually measure.

Welcome to CA. If you are intrested in the auditing of climate science you won’t find a better website/blog. Steve is very thorough and IMO often too polite towards some of the trolls who occasional visit. Stick around you’ll learn a lot.

There seems to be some confusion over residence times and the time required to establish equilibrium. The residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is simply found by dividing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by the total atmosphere to land/ocean flux and comes out at 750 PgC/150 pgC.yr^-1 or 5 years. This is different to the time required to establish equilibrium after a system has been perturbated.

Gunnar I meant that measuring a change of 20ppm in CO2 is relatively easy instrumentally. Interpreting measurements is another matter. For what it’s worth I trust the Mauna Loa measurements. They are matched by measurements at Scripps, Southern California; Cape Grim, Tasmania and Alaska all showing rises in CO2 concentration.

With respect to the calculations on the change in oxygen level I’m not sure what your estimate relates to. Is it the annual change?

#362 Mark, I think you probably mean ‘a few parts per million’ rather than’a few parts per billion’. But your reasoning is correct and that is what we observe when making such measurements. Now it is possible to argue over the interpretation but at some point it’s useful to invoke Occam’s razor. It seems, at least to me, that the simplest interpretation that unifies our observations on isotopes, CO2 levels, oxygen levels is that the recent perturbation can best be explained largely by fossil fuel burning, in combination with cement production and deforestation.

Now I’m not saying anything about AGW. The radiative role of CO2 is another discussion that steve has set up elsewhere.

#364…MarkW a few years back I received an email from someone who wanted data to support his contention that man would take himself to extinction because of the drop in O2 levels. I had to point out that we are measuring tiny, tiny changes that had absolutely no implications for life on the planet, human or otherwise.

Metals rusting take a lot of O2 out of the atmosphere. Refining of metals from ore would presumably put O2 into the atmosphere. Unless the O2 is consumed by some other reaction in the refining process that I’m not aware of.

In the early part of the last century, huge amounts of iron was dug up and refined to support the growing industrial revolution. In the last few decades we’ve been shifting, in massive amounts to other materials. The result of this would be that, at present, the amount of iron rusting exceeds the amount of iron being refined.

Re: 354 and 357
Agree with Gunnar’s take. Arguing that we are depleting O2 is hairsplitting of the first order. Until someone conclusively shows it’s harmful, more CO2 benefits the biosphere and humans get by very well on 30% of 21% O2 everytime we breath. A 20ppm drop is the last thing to keep us awake at night I would think.

…It is hard to see how other processes which generate CO2, other than burning fossil fuels can lead to a decrease in the oxygen content of the atmosphere. Hence the finger points towards fossil fuels!

There must be something else in addition to fossil fuels to account for the decrease in O2. Over the last ten years CO2 has increased by 15 ppm while O2 has decreased by 30 ppm according to your numbers. Since an O2 molecule is an O2 molecule the numbers should be about the same, shouldn’t they?

Since CO2 rises and falls annually we should also see a corresponding fall and rise for O2. Do we?”

Bob, in answer between 1990 and 1997 CO2 increased by about 9ppm and oxygen decreased by 22ppm. The reason we don’t see an approximate 1:1 correlation is because photosynthesis takes out some of the carbon and pumps oxygen back into the atmosphere, and the oceans take out CO2 as dissolved inorganic carbon but has relatively little effect on oxygen levels.

With respect to seasonal variations you’re absolutely right..the CO2 and O2 cycles are in antiphase to each other. There’s also a diurnal cycle with photosynthesis during the day and respiration at night.

#367 Interesting point MarkW….perhaps we need an inventory for rusting iron too. I’ve not seen one.

#368 Who was saying that the decrease in oxygen concentration was harmful. Certainly not me. I was using the combined oxygen and carbon cycles to illustrate why I’m presently convinced by the hypothesis that burning fossil fuels is a major contributor to the present perturbation of the atmospheric CO2 levels.

I don’t think Paul is arguing this is a problem, quite the contrary. He’s just drawing conclusions about CO2 from the O2 measurements (at least, coupled with CO2 measurements). I simply thing the errors involved are too great because the quantities are either a) tiny, or b) estimated/measured poorly. I.e., an error of only 0.5 ppm on the O2 content drastically changes any correlation with CO2 content, which has its own measurement problems.

#371 Thankyou Mark T. Out of interest, in my lab we can measure the oxygen content of the atmosphere to a precision of about 1ppm. i.e. 210,000 +/- 1ppm. Analytically this is excellent but of course we would like to do better. It means that we have to maintain standards over many years in order to detect small changes in atmospheric composition say over a 5 to 10 year period. It’s challenging to say the least.

Anyway, I’m based in the UK and if there are any UK residents, or visitors from anywhere else who would like to visit and see and debate the work being done then please feel free to contact me. I keep an open door policy in my lab.

Unfortunately for you, the AGW idea requires a lifetime of 100+ years. Evidence has falsified the idea.

>> You did not answer or understand the isotope evidence.

Yes, I did. You are claiming a conclusion that is not backed up by measurements. Segalstad explains: “CO2 from hydrocarbon combustion and from biospheric materials have delta-13-C values near -26 permil. “Natural” CO2 has delta-13-C values of -7 permil in equilibrium with CO2 dissolved in the hydrosphere and in marine calcium carbonate. Mixing these two atmospheric CO2 components: IPCC’s 21% CO2 from fossil fuel burning + 79% “natural” CO2 should give a delta-13-C of the present atmospheric CO2 of approximately -11 permil, calculated by isotopic mass balance (Segalstad, 1992; 1996).

This atmospheric CO2 delta-13-C mixing value of -11 permil to be expected from IPCC’s model is not found in actual measurements. Keeling et al. (1989) reported a measured atmospheric delta-13-C value of -7.489 permil in December 1978, decreasing to -7.807 permil in December 1988 (the significance of all their digits not justified). These values are close to the value of the natural atmospheric CO2 reservoir, far from the delta-13-C value of -11 permil expected from the IPCC model.

From the measured delta-13-C values in atmospheric CO2 we can by isotopic mass balance also calculate that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is equal to or less than 4%, supporting the carbon-14 “Suess Effect” evidence. Hence the IPCC model is neither supported by radioactive nor stable carbon isotope evidence (Segalstad, 1992; 1993; 1996).”

>> You conflated modern CO2 measuring capabilities with older ones known to be in error.

I referenced direct C02 measurements from that time, performed by scientists using a standardized method, published in scientific papers. Neither the IPCC, nor you, can give us any scientific reason why these measurements are not valid.

Instead, you give us a bad C02 proxy for 1940. Ice Cores are very inaccurate. There are significant problems associated with testing trace quantities of atmospheric gases. One is the adsorption and desorption of gases on sample system surfaces. The second is Knudsen diffusion. The effect of this would be that the gas analyses would show reduced variation over time. The evidence of this inaccuracy can be seen by looking at Leaf stomata indices (SI), a good proxy for C02 concentrations. SI shows much higher C02 levels AND more variation. This conforms with current C02 measurement variability. More specifically, the vostok study has been exposed as a scientific fraud. They cherry picked and massaged data to come up with their reconstruction.

Nearly all the C02 measurements (90,000 data points) were obtained in rural areas without large industrial contamination. The measurements had a systematic error ranging from 1% to 3%. The Pettenkofer method was developed from eleven principal measuring techniques (including gravimetric, titrimetric, volumetric and manometric). The IPCC has ignored these chemical methods despite being the standard in analytical chemistry for 100 years, rejecting the data as faulty and inaccurate, but providing no scientific support for that view. The Pettenkofer process was used universally as a standard and was accurate enough to develop all the modern knowledge of medicine, biology and physiology (photosynthesis, respiration end energy metabolism).

Based on these measurements, we know that the C02 level was 420 in 1940, contrary to AGW propoganda.

>> You claimed that all carbon from FF went into the atmosphere, then was pushed in to the ocean and biosphere very quickly only to be replaced with some unknown natural CO2 source.

Huh? There is a natural carbon cycle that maintains the atmospheric C02 levels. C02 in the atmosphere is analogous to water flowing in a river.

As I’ve said, there are an infinite number of shifting data points on “the temperature of the ocean”: Meaning, for those of you not paying attention, there isn’t one. So all we can do is sample and model. The satties measure Sea Surface Temperature. Period. All we can talk about is the surface.

And even still, the surface isn’t warming anyway, according to the SSTs. As I went into more detail in #320, I plotted the ERSSTs as absolutes for the temp average of all 2×2 grids for 152 years. The mean was +18.32 C for either 1854-2006 or 1961-1990. There was a 0 trend for the min, +.16 for the mean and +.32 for the max.

Here’s the mean for start and end over either base period:

1834: +.06
2006: +.22

I attribute any rise to changing from ships/bouys to satties and/or margin of error.

Refining of metals from ore would presumably put O2 into the atmosphere. Unless the O2 is consumed by some other reaction in the refining process that I’m not aware of.

Hate to be snarky, but apparently there’s lots you’re not aware of. Iron is refined by using coke (i.e. carbon) to pull the oxygen from the ore out producing CO2 and metal. The same is true for most other metals. In a few cases, chiefly aluminum, the metal is produced electrolytically, though even then carbon electrodes are used which produce CO2 and only the energy in excess of what carbon can provide comes from the electric current. And even then the electricity could come from carbon burning power plants. Though in the past a lot of aluminum plants were located near hydroelectric power plants which wouldn’t use coal or oil.

>> Gunnar I meant that measuring a change of 20ppm in CO2 is relatively easy instrumentally.

Ok, I understand.

>> For what it’s worth I trust the Mauna Loa measurements.

They have to “adjust” the figures for the active volcanoe right next to them. They only take measurements when the wind is blowing from the sea (which implicitly indicates the source of C02. The weather is another explanation for the seasonal variation. There have been reports of only reporting the data that fits. Clearly, the creators of that program were AGWers, and everyone working there has a job that depends on the correct conclusion. That said, I still believe that C02 levels are probably increasing. My hypothesis: Sun warms oceans, Oceans outgas C02.

>> They are matched by measurements at Scripps, Southern California; Cape Grim, Tasmania and Alaska all showing rises in CO2 concentration.

But contradicted by the 2005 Luxembourg study, which found (contrary to Mauna Loa) that C02 goes up in the summer, not down. What’s more, they saw no upward trend over the 3 year period, contrary to Mauna Loa.

>> Is it the annual change?

Yes, our calculation agreed.

>> Now I’m not saying anything about AGW.

That seems reasonable, since it seems only to indicate that man is burning hydrocarbons, which is not in dispute.

>> oceans take out CO2 as dissolved inorganic carbon but has relatively little effect on oxygen levels.

Henry’s law applies to Oxygen as well, so it’s the same.

>> I was using the combined oxygen and carbon cycles to illustrate why I’m presently convinced by the hypothesis that burning fossil fuels is a major contributor to the present perturbation of the atmospheric CO2 levels.

This is where I’m losing you. This does not change the fact that there are huge natural processes going on, and that the AGW premise that all is in balance, but for man, is completely false. It’s more of a religious statement, and completely indefensible. The calculation that I did was static, assuming no reaction from the biosphere. How long have you been measuring Oxygen? You are probably seeing a localized effect. Measuring the global O level is extremely complicated, maybe unknowable. And if we do calculations for C02 similar to what we did for Oxygen:

So, in a static analysis and pretending Henry’s law doesn’t exist, raising the level by 30% should have taken 372 years!

Yet, the AGWers claim that it happened in only some 60 years. Clearly, this MIMO system is not easy to measure and there are other forces at work here. And Henry’s law does exist. Everytime we open up a soda pop, we should say: Henry’s law does exist, AGW is impossible.

>> I.e., an error of only 0.5 ppm on the O2 content drastically changes any correlation with CO2 content, which has its own measurement problems.

Exactly. This is the kind of measurement that would change if you breathed on it.

Clearly, the creators of that program were AGWers and everyone working there has a job that depends on the correct conclusion

Way to bash the intergrity of scientists you don’t even know–going back 30 years even.

But contradicted by the 2005 Luxembourg study

Have you ever thought that something might be wrong with this study? It’s contradicted by every other study of CO2 in the atmosphere out there. Aren’t they measuring CO2 in the middle of industrial Europe? Don’t you think that’s a bad idea?

>> Way to bash the intergrity of scientists you don’t even know’€”going back 30 years even

After the work by M&M with the Mann hockey stick, no scientist or group of scientists should expect respect, if they do not publish their raw data.

Looking at the large range of values found in the luxembourg study, the comment by Bacastow that the Mauna Loa measurements were “edited” seem quite plausible. Pales & Keeling said that large portions of the raw data were rejected, leaving just a small fraction to be subjected to averaging techniques. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Scripps program to monitor CO2 in the atmosphere was conceived and initiated by Dr. Roger Revelle (Revelle evasion factor). Pales & Keeting say “Revelle foresaw the geochemical implications of the rise in atmospheric CO2 resulting from fossil fuel combustion, and he sought means to ensure that this ‘large scale geophysical experiment‘ .. was documented”. Pales & Keeting continue “he inspired us to keep in sight the objectives which he had originally persuaded us to accept.”

Does this sound like true, unbiased research? All they were doing was measuring C02. Why would they need inspiration to keep the objectives in sight? What were the objectives? Why the need for persuasion? What’s so hard about measuring C02, and reporting all the data.

>> Have you ever thought that something might be wrong with this study?

They reported their raw data. Operating a FIR instrument is simple, so there is nothing to go wrong.

>> It’s contradicted by every other study of CO2 in the atmosphere out there.

But they don’t publish their raw data. Besides, we’re talking about a very small number of testing sites.

>> Aren’t they measuring CO2 in the middle of industrial Europe? Don’t you think that’s a bad idea?

You see, you say this because of your AGW premise that man is the main source of C02. In reality, man’s C02 output is dwarfed by natural causes. For example, the ocean, volcanoes, etc. Now, they are measuring C02 in the middle of the ocean, on top of one volcanoe, right next to an active volcanoe, only when the wind blows in from the sea. That IS A BAD IDEA. When the wind blows from the land, the readings go way down. In the luxembourg study, they reported that there was no C02 dome over cities.

This discussion exposes the fatal flaw in the whole AGW idea: We cannot determine the global C02 level by measuring it one place. What would you think if we measured the temperature in only one place, and said that was the global average?

This layman has been trying to understand the useful material provided by Mr. Biggs. Let’s see if I have it anywhere near correct. Four independent but lightly coupled periodic systems find themselves from time to time in phase, with the result that the coupling is substantially increased. This then causes phase shift in one or more of these systems so that they are no longer in synchronicity.

Do the authors propose a physical mechanism for this phenomenon? Seems to me that all the physics analogues (electronics, mechanical resonance, …) that I am aware of have exactly the opposite effect when coupling is increased–the tendency is to lock in the synchronicity. Or perhaps I don’t understand how they are using this word.